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Torres faces three weeks on sidelines

• Specialist advises conservative treatment to avoid surgery
• Liverpool striker likely to miss four matches for Liverpool

Fernando Torres faces three weeks on the sidelines after flying to Spain for a second opinion on his troublesome groin problem, according to reports in the Spanish press.

Liverpool’s medical team had told the Spain striker that he needed an operation, similar to the one Steven Gerrard had last season, but Torres, desperate to avoid surgery at any cost, asked to be allowed to seek another medical opinion. The manager Rafael Benítez agreed and the club provided a private jet to take Torres to Valencia yesterday where he consulted a specialist, Dr Ramón Cugat.

Following an examination Dr Cugat prescribed a conservative treatment, based on complete rest for three weeks, which it is hoped will clear up the problem without recourse to the surgeon’s knife.

Torres has returned to Liverpool’s Melwood training ground where the club and player will make the final decision on his treatment but the Spanish press has already ruled him out of Spain’s friendlies against Argentina on 14 November and Austria on 18 November. He is likely to miss four matches for Liverpool: three in the Premier League and the crucial Champions League encounter away to Debrecen on 24 November.

Paulton Rovers live the FA Cup dream

The Somerset village of Paulton welcomes the cameras and Norwich City in the biggest mismatch of the FA Cup first round

How amusing it would be to catch a glimpse of the expressions on the faces of the Norwich City players as their team coach winds its way through a corner of Somerset on Saturday morning, into the village of Paulton, passing the former miners’ houses dotted along Winterfield Road before pulling into the home of the lowest-ranked club left in the FA Cup this season.

Paulton Rovers, who play in the Zamaretto South and West League, have never reached the first round of the competition before, sit five divisions below Norwich and have an average attendance this season of 235. This afternoon almost 10 times as many will be shoehorned into a ground which, for Paul Lambert’s League One players, is sure to feel a million miles from Carrow Road. “Norwich will not know what’s hit them,” says Andy Jones, the Paulton manager.

“Living the dream” is the favourite expression at the non-league club ahead of a game that, through live television coverage, gate receipts and sponsorship deals, is expected to net around £150,000. Or, to put it another way, six times Paulton’s profit last year. “Pinch me and I’ll wake up,” says David Bissix, Paulton’s long-serving chairman, who, after suffering a brain haemorrhage last month, describes the match as “a hell of a boost to me”.

Ever since the draw was made a little under two weeks ago, Paulton have worked around the clock to ensure that the game could be staged on their home ground. No one has put in more hours than Jones, who also runs a wholesale florist in Bristol, which turns over £10m a year and employs three of the Paulton players. “We are at our busiest around Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day and this is like the two of them rolled into one,” the Paulton manager says.

Jones acknowledges that the level of media attention has come as something of a shock to an area that lives in the shadow of nearby Bristol and Bath. “The thing we were most famous for in Paulton was Purnell, the printing firm that Robert Maxwell used to own,” Jones says. “It used to employ 3,500 people at one time. That went bankrupt. It was a huge shock to the village.”

Before then, Paulton, which has a population of just under 5,000, was synonymous with coal mining, with the slag heap behind the ground providing a constant reminder of another once-thriving industry. With all of the 2,160 tickets available for Norwich’s visit sold, Jones predicts that the landmark will be used by some of the more resourceful locals today, such is the desire to see the biggest game in the club’s 128-year history.

The pitch, apart from being on a slope, is surprisingly good, although Norwich may be less impressed with the changing facilities. “When we’ve had friendlies against professional clubs, like Plymouth, we actually put a marquee on the side to fit all their players, staff and equipment in,” says Rob Cousins, Paulton’s veteran defender. “I don’t think that’ll be happening this weekend. They’ll be in that small changing room, very close to each other and it will be a test of their character.”

Cousins, who is a pensions administrator, is Paulton’s lucky omen. The 38-year-old has made 987 senior appearances across 20 seasons and played against league opposition in the FA Cup on nine previous occasions during spells with Bath City, Yeovil Town and Forest Green Rovers. He has, remarkably, got through or forced a replay in all but one of those ties, a record that suggests his experience could be invaluable against Norwich. “I’ll be saying to the players: ‘Don’t freeze, enjoy it and, most importantly, keep the ball,’” Cousins says. “If we don’t keep the ball, we’ll be chasing all afternoon.”

Not that Paulton are thinking negatively. “Norwich are a huge club but anything is possible,” adds Jones, whose three-year-old son, Morgan, will be mascot. “A good friend of mine, Brian Owen, played in the Hereford side that beat Newcastle – he actually scored the goal at Newcastle that brought them back to Hereford for Ronnie Radford to score his famous goal. One thing I will tell my players is that it has happened in the past and it will definitely happen in the future. The future could be this afternoon.”

Metz magic and Dons’ taming of Munich

From Metz feeding Bernd Schuster ham to Aberdeen lighting up the north, here are some of the great European shocks

1. Barcelona 1-4 Metz (agg: 5-6), 10 October 1984, Cup Winners’ Cup, first round

No one saw this coming – almost literally, because after Metz had lost the home leg 4-2 no French TV or radio station bothered to cover the seemingly pointless return match and the Camp Nou was only a quarter full. The pessimism surrounding Metz was understandable: their previous two away matches in the league had been a 6-0 defeat at Bordeaux and a 7-0 mauling at Monaco, and, after the Catalans had benefited from a series of mistakes to win the first leg 4-2, the Barcelona playmaker Bernd Schuster said he would “give the Metz players some ham when they come to our place to thank them for the presents that they give us tonight”.

“They really looked down on us – and that made us so angry,” Michel Ettore, the Metz goalkeeper, recalled recently. “We wanted to wipe away their insults.” After half an hour at Camp Nou, however, Barça’s belief grew even stronger as Lobo Carrasco fired past Ettore to make it 5-2 on aggregate. With less than an hour to go, Metz needed four goals. In the 38th minute Tony Kurbos hurtled down the right and, with the goalkeeper anticipating a cross, sent the ball, perhaps flukily, straight into the net from an acute angle. Sixty seconds later Metz carved open the Barça defence and Sánchez diverted a Kurbos cross into his own goal to leave Metz requiring “only” two more goals. Ten minutes into the second half the irrepressible Kurbos latched on to a sweet through ball and clipped it over the keeper to make it 5-5 on aggregate, but with Barça still in front on away goals. The home side attempted to rally but Ettore and his defenders produced improbable block after improbable block.

“Every time it seemed they were about to score we’d get a head, a foot or an arse in the way – we felt invincible,” Ettore said. In the 85th minute Metz tore forward again, the Senegal striker Jules Bocandé feinted his way to the byline and pulled back towards the penalty spot, where Kurbos, of course, arrived to lift it into the net and ignite ecstatic French celebrations. “I ran straight up to Schuster and bawled: ‘Where’s your ham now?’” Ettore said. “I don’t think he speaks French but he understood me that night.” Paul Doyle

2. Porto 4-3 Wrexham (agg: 4-4), 1984-85 Cup Winners’ Cup, first round

Wrexham were lucky to be in the Cup Winners’ Cup, having failed to fulfil the competition’s fairly obvious criterion. Shrewsbury had in fact won the Welsh Cup in 1984, but the Shrews could not represent Wales in European competition, the snag being that pesky border which placed Shrewsbury nine miles inside England. The beaten finalists, then, took their place.

But by 1984 Wrexham were a club in disarray. Back-to-back relegations in 1982 and 1983 had sent them spiralling from the Second Division to the Fourth, bringing financial hardship. They were left with only 14 professionals on their books and in their squad were three teenagers – Paul Nicholl, Gary Pugh and Kevin Jones – whose careers in football had begun in the summer courtesy of the government’s Youth Training Scheme because the club could not afford to pay them. They warmed up for the first leg with a 3-1 home defeat against Peterborough in front of 1,704 die-hard fans, a result that left them 82nd of the 92 League clubs.

Porto, then, should have been an impossible task. The visiting side that lined up for the first leg contained seven of the players who had been in the team beaten 2-1 by Juventus in the previous year’s final, plus a young Paulo Futre. A host of them had helped Portugal to a World Cup qualifying victory over Sweden the week before. Predictably they dominated much of the first half, but the Welsh side grew into the game and Jim Steel’s bullet header gave them a remarkable victory. Just 4,935 had been at the Racecourse ground for the first leg; nearly 40,000 packed into Estádio das Antas in Porto for the return game. In what Steel would later describe as “a bloody hurricane” the hosts raced into a 3-0 lead within 38 minutes, but the Robins’ captain, Jake King, pulled two goals back just before half-time. Futre put the Portuguese back in command with a goal in the second half before Barry Horne, signed from Rhyl in the summer, made it 4-3 in the dying minutes, giving the Welshmen an astonishing victory on away goals. Their reward was a trip to Italy to take on the beaten European Cup finalists of 1983-84, Roma. A 3-0 aggregate defeat meant an honourable exit, but the players had already written themselves into Wrexham, and indeed European, folklore. John Ashdown

3. CSKA Sofia 2-0 Ajax (agg: 2-1), 24/10/1973, European Cup second round

Ajax had been shocked before – not least in 1960 when they were beaten 4-3 by the Norwegian amateurs Fredrikstad – but those defeats came before they had evolved into the European powerhouse of the early 1970s. This came when they were close to the height of their powers. In 1971, ‘72 and ‘73 they had won a hat-trick of European Cups under Rinus Michels and then Istvan Kovacs. Johan Cruyff had departed for Barcelona in the summer of 1973, but this was still the team of Johan Neeskens, Arie Haan, Johnny Rep and Piet Keizer. They had not been beaten in Europe since the defeat to Arsenal in the semi-final of the Fairs Cup in 1969-70. They had won six of the previous eight Eredivise titles.

CSKA by comparison, despite their domestic success (four back-to-back titles from 1969), had never made an impact on the European scene. They’d reached the European Cup semis in 1967 but in the previous year’s European Cup they had been destroyed 6-1 over two legs by the same Ajax side. They’d reached the second round in bizarre circumstances after their second leg with Panathinaikos was replayed after the game had gone to penalties. A Jan Mulder goal gave Ajax a 1-0 victory in the first leg, but that was nullified in Sofia when Dimitar Marashliev scored in the 68th minute. Extra-time was needed. In the 116th minute, Stefan Mikhailov struck to give the Bulgarians a famous victory and effectively end Ajax’s golden era. It was to be 14 years before the once-dominant club won another European title. JA

4. Chelsea 1-1 Atvidaberg (Atvidaberg win on away goals), Cup Winners’ Cup, 2nd round, 1971

Six months previously Chelsea had lifted the trophy by beating Real Madrid in the final, and they began their defence of the Cup Winners’ Cup with a narrow 21-0 aggregate victory over Jeunesse Hautcharage of Luxembourg. So nobody expected them to slip up in the next round against the Swedish part-timers. Even after being held 0-0 in the away leg, Peter Osgood and Co were anticipating a slaughter at Stamford Bridge, as indeed were the Swedes, who, in the words of David Lacey in the Guardian, “threw nine men back in their defence with a fatalism worthy of Bergman”.

Atvidaberg survived the first half but within 10 seconds of the resumption they finally fell behind, Alan Hudson finding the net from 20 yards. John Hollins’ penalty miss a few minutes later was not expected to matter but, amazingly, it did, as in the 68th minute the visitors mounted their attack of the game and the striker Roland Sandberg dashed on to a pass from Lars-Goran Andersson and slid the ball past Peter Bonnetti for an equaliser. Chelsea failed to respond and, indeed, failed to accept their defeat with good grace. “One of the Chelsea players spat at me,” said the forward Ralf Edstrom recently, adding: “They were real pigs. Absolutely! Pigs! A lot of people say that the Englishmen were always fair. And maybe they were – when they were playing each other. Against foreign teams they were dirty all the time.” PD

5. Dinamo Tbilisi 3-0 Liverpool (agg: 4-2), 3/10/1979, European Cup first round

Teams from behind the Iron Curtain were always shrouded in mystery – in previews they were habitually referred to as “the crack Soviet outfit” or “the ruthless Red Army” but no one knew for sure how good they would turn out to be. Would Tbilisi be as nifty as Ferencvaros and Red Star Belgrade had proved when upsetting Liverpool earlier in the decade, albeit before Bob Paisley had elevated the club to a higher level with two European Cup triumphs? No. They would turn out to be better than anything the English champions had ever encountered. Already in the first leg at Anfield, where the home side had prevailed 2-1, Dinamo had shown flashes of a technical and tactical sophistication that perplexed the hosts. In Tibilisi came the full onslaught.

Liverpool barely slept the night before the match – some 200 Dinamo fans having staged a torchlight parade around their hotel at 4am – but mostly it was Dinamo’s rapid passing and jagged running that made them so sluggish. Dinamo made it 1-0 on the night after a moment that should feature permanently in the Match of the Day intro footage: David Kipiani dazzled past Alan Hansen with a piece of trickery that left the acclaimed denouncer of diabolical defending floundering like a drunk in the dark. Ray Clemence diverted the ensuing cross, but only as far as Vladimir Gutsaev, who slammed it into the net. The Georgians’ second arrived in the 75th minute when Georgiy Chilaya collected the ball in his own half, slalomed past three opponents and slipped in Ramaz Shengelia, who casually lifted the ball over Clemence to make it 2-0. Three minutes later came the third after Phil Thompson conceded a penalty and Alexandre Chivadze converted with ease. Hansen has since said this was the best Liverpool team he ever played in. Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg would avenge them in the next round, knocking out Dinamo. PD

6. Aberdeen 3-2 Bayern Munich (agg: 3-2), Cup Winners’ Cup quarter-final, 1983

An up-and-coming manager named Alex Ferguson had already made Aberdeen a force in Scotland but not until this dramatic night did Europe realise that here was a side to be reckoned with. Applauded just for reaching this stage of the tournament, Aberdeen were expected to be dispatched by Bayern, who counted Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Paul Breitner in their team. After a valiant 0-0 draw in Munich, the Dons fans were dreading the concession of an early goal at Pittodrie and their worst fears were realised when Klaus Augenthaler stepped regally forward to drive the ball into the net in the 10th minute. Neil Simpson equalised before half-time, but soon the Scots were put back in their supposed place, when Hans Pflügler smashed a crisp left-footed volley past Jim Leighton.

Needing two goals to progress, Ferguson introduced two substitutes – John McMaster and John Hewitt. In the 76th minute the former combined with Gordon Strachan to outwit the German defence with a free-kick routine that has since become commonplace at Manchester United, leaving Strachan to cross for Alex McLeish to head an equaliser. One minute later, the Bayern keeper Manfred Müller parried an Eric Black header and Hewitt, with his first touch after five months out with injury, stabbed in a sensational winner. Now all of Europe was aware of something special brewing in Scotland, but neither Waterschei in the semi-final, nor Real Madrid in the final, could concoct a remedy, and Aberdeen completed one of the most astonishing campaigns in European history. PD

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