Gothenburg great John McMaster has claimed Aberdeen ’s win over Real Madrid in the 1983 European Cup Winners’ Cup final is the greatest ever Scottish football achievement.
With the 40th anniversary of the Pittodrie club’s finest hour looming on May 11, the man who played left back in the Ullevi Stadium on that rain-lashed night is convinced that, pound-for-pound, Aberdeen’s glory eclipsed that of Celtic winning the European Cup in 1967 and Rangers lifting the Cup Winners’ Cup five years later. And McMaster, now 67, believes Sir Alex Ferguson team was one the best on the planet 40 years ago, having been named the No 3 in the UEFA rankings, behind Benfica and Hamburg, the latter of whom the Dons defeated in the European Super Cup to become the only Scottish team to lift two Euro trophies.
Speaking on the Daily Record’s Off The Record podcast, he said: “In Scotland we’re not supposed to win European trophies. And with the resources Aberdeen had, we shouldn’t have won ours.
“But we did. I’m not being biased, with the resources Celtic and Rangers had, 60,000 fans every week, but for us to lift European silverware outwith our country that should be lauded way above Celtic and Rangers. Don’t get me wrong, I was a Celtic fan that night (Lisbon) and I became a Rangers fan that night (Barcelona).
"I was always a Morton fan and then I was an Aberdeen man, but that, for me, has got to be the biggest achievement out of the three. In a financial sense, we were punching above our weight.
“We also got a medal for those UEFA rankings that year. The boss (Ferguson) said we weren’t a one-trophy team. We were a four trophy team that year, winning the Super Cup, Cup Winners Cup, Scottish Cup and also that medal. We might have been the best team in the world at the time.
“Hamburg were the European champions and we beat them in the Super Cup. A team of Aberdeen’s resources? Really?”
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