During the close season of 1977, Newcastle United supporters on the face of it had much to look forward to.
Notwithstanding the departure of long-time fans' favourite Malcolm Macdonald, a new-look Magpies outfit had managed to achieve a creditable fifth-place First Division finish at the end of the previous campaign. It was United's highest top-flight placing since 1951.
It also meant the return of European football to St James' Park in the shape of qualification for the UEFA Cup. For those of us too young to have witnessed the glory days of the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in the late 1960s, the thought of seeing top continental teams in the flesh fired our imaginations.
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All summer, us young 'uns dreamed of seeing our heroes in black and white facing up to the cream of Germany, Italy and Spain under the Gallowgate floodlights. When the draw for the first round of the 1977-78 UEFA Cup was made, there were a host of stellar names in the hat alongside Newcastle United, including Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Inter Milan.
In the event, however, United’s first-round opponents would be the unfancied Bohemians of Dublin. But if that appeared wholly underwhelming, the first leg of the tie on Wednesday, September 14, 1977 in front of 25,000 fans in the Irish capital, would prove to be memorable - for all the wrong reasons.
The game, an uneventful 0-0 draw, was overshadowed by continuous violence and missile-throwing on the terraces, with United's goalkeeper, Mick Mahoney, felled by a bottle before the teams were led off the pitch for 11 minutes. 'Frightening' was the page one headline in the following day's Evening Chronicle as we splashed on the events at Dalymount Park.
"I've never been so frightened in all my life," defender Irving Nattrass told the Chronicle's John Gibson who was reporting on the game in Dublin. Winger Stewart Barrowclough added: "A half-brick flew Micky Burns' ear and cut a huge divot out of the ground. If one of us had been hit, it could have been fatal."
Mahoney who received treatment from the club doctor after being struck on the head said: "I wasn't unconscious, but I was certainly dazed." With the team off the pitch and locked inside the dressing room, manager Richard Dinnis said: "The noise above was deafening with fans stamping their feet, while a few bricks smashed off the window." United's fans at the game, Gibson reported, were pelted with a hail of bricks, bottles, cans and "large sticks thrown like javelins".
Decades later, the Chronicle's legendary sports writer recalled: "As the two-legged tie was against part-timers it looked a jolly for Newcastle... except this was the time of the shameful terrorist atrocities on both sides of the divide which were scarring a green and pleasant land."
When a Union Jack was unfurled by a fan behind the press box, all hell was let loose, remembered Gibbo. "A hail of half bricks was launched in its direction which meant, when they fell slightly short of their target, they thudded on to the desk where I was sitting. Or rather by now under which I was sheltering."
Mercifully, the United team, fans and local journalists escaped shaken but relatively unscathed from the ordeal and made it back in one piece to Tyneside where thoughts turned to the return leg at St James' Park two weeks later.
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