Real Madrid and all that: 1970/71, the season which defined Cardiff City for the rest of the twentieth century

Paul Evans was fourteen when the 1970/71 football season started and it turned out to be a momentous and it turned out to be a momentous and seminal one for the team he supported, Cardiff City. The headline capturing moment came in a European Cup Winners Cup Quarter Final tie with mighty Real Madrid which saw the Spanish giants beaten at Ninian Park thereby giving the Bluebirds a narrow lead to take into the Second Leg in the Bernabeu a fortnight later. Paul writes extensively on these games as he recalls how a seventeen year old winger called Nigel Rees crossed for Brian Clark to head the match winning goal, but this book is far more than just a retelling of those two games.Paul was at more than half of the matches Cardiff played that season and combining his recollections with accounts in the two local daily papers of the time and the much missed "pink un" which was the Football Echo, he provides an analysis of every first team game played in what was an exciting, but ultimately heartbreaking, season that had consequences for the club that lasted until the late nineties.Illustrated with occasional photos from match programmes Paul had access to, Real Madrid and all that has full team line ups, details of goalscorers, goal times and attendances from each match, but it is much more than a dry retelling of matches backed up by statistics. There's a section on the appointment of Jimmy Scoular as Cardiff manager in 1964 (and Paul's parents' horror at said appointment!) which extends into a review of his, far from successful, early years at Cardiff and the book ends with a section on what happened to Scoular and the club after 70/71.The majority of the book is taken up though by that season fifty years ago which many Cardiff supporters look back on with a mixture of affection, regret and anger. There is a comprehensive review of the controversial sale of Cardiff's much sought after goalscorer, local boy John Toshack, which provoked a furious fan reaction at the time and still reverberates to an extent now, a description of the greatest goal Paul has ever seen Cardiff score, of a traumatic first couple of months at the club for a newly signed goalkeeper, a one man destruction of a Carlisle United side that was pushing for promotion to the old First Division and hero worship of the great Ian Gibson!There are nods to the football world beyond Cardiff City with stories that Paul came across in his research and references to both the wider sporting world and what is was like to be growing up in Cardiff as the world moved from the "peace and love" of the sixties into the harsher new decade.