With Royal Wedding fever sweeping the country, both Liverpool and Real Madrid have overcome Italian and German opposition in the semi-finals to reach the final of Europe’s most prestigious club competition where they will meet at the end of May to decide who truly is the cream of the continent – welcome to the spring of 1981.
Some eight weeks before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, as she was then, Liverpool found themselves preparing to head to Paris to face Europe’s very own footballing Royalty, Real Madrid, who themselves had won the giant cup on six occasions.
The build-up to the game was far from smooth for the men from Anfield with Kenny Dalglish only given a 50/50 chance of starting the match due to an ankle injury while Alan Kennedy had been sidelined for six weeks with a broken wrist; and shortly before the game their preparation was thrown into turmoil due to an argument with a television broadcaster.
With just hours to kick-off Liverpool manager Bob Paisley had been told his team couldn’t take to the field with shirts bearing the Umbro logo in an era before across-the-board advertising and rabid commercialisation; leaving players scrabbling around for anything they could use to cover up the offending motif.
But as he had so often done in the past, Paisley saw such issues as minor distractions which his team must overcome, “if someone puts problems in our way, we'll get over them,” was very much his mantra.
Liverpool had overcome Oulun Palloseura, Aberdeen, CSKA Sofia and Bayern Munich to reach the final, their third having won the trophy in 1977 and 1978, while Madrid had beaten Limerick, Honvéd, Spartak Moscow and Internazionale to confirm their ninth final in a competition they hadn’t won since 1966.
The game was a relatively untidy affair which became more of a tactical contest on a bumpy and uneven surface with future Real Madrid and Spain manager, Jose Antonio Camacho, wasting the Spanish side's best chance, while Alan Kennedy had a 30 yard effort saved early on and Graeme Souness, who had been put through by the barely fit Dalglish failed to beat keeper Agustin Rodriguez.
But Liverpool grew in strength as Souness began to run the show in midfield and Laurie Cunningham, Madrid’s English star, was kept quiet by Phil Neal down the right wing; a battle which subsequently allowed Alan Kennedy the freedom to surge forward down the left wing.
And with just eight minutes of the game remaining and extra-time looming it was one of these attacking sorties from Kennedy which brought about the only goal of the game.
A Ray Kennedy throw found his namesake Alan, whose surging run had caught the Real defence off-guard, ghosting past Real defender Rafael García Cortés into the box and beating the goalkeeper to give Liverpool the lead.
"I wasn't thinking about scoring a goal, I was thinking that if I could make a run here it might create a bit of space for Souness, McDermott or Dalglish," Kennedy remembers. "But Dalglish had come to the byline so I ran into the space that had been left open for me.
After scoring the goal Kennedy ran to the Liverpool fans behind the goal to celebrate with those who had made the journey over to France before being mobbed by his delirious teammates.
And the celebrations didn’t end there. After the game the players headed to a reception in town and some even went to a Paris nightclub with the huge European Cup in tow and after partying the night away returned home for an open top bus parade of the city.
"The homecoming was unbelievable," Kennedy, who went on to score the winning penalty in Liverpool's 1984 European Cup shootout triumph over AS Roma in Rome, told the BBC "There was red and blue everywhere because the Everton fans came out to support us too.”
The victory gave Liverpool their third European Cup as manager Bob Paisley became the first man to win a hat-trick of trophies while the win was also the fifth consecutive year that an English team had become champions of Europe; soon to become six when Aston Villa beat Bayern Munich in Rotterdam 12 months later.
