THE HANGOVER, PART I
Thursday, May 20, 1971. It’s 11am at the Hilton Athens Hotel, but 27-degree heat is already searing down on the poolside concrete. Among scorched football fans and bikini-clad holidaymakers, a group of Chelsea players ruminate over the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup final a day before. The Blues had been moments away from beating the mighty Real Madrid to secure the trophy, when sweeper Ignacio Zoco levelled with the last kick of normal time. A replay was scheduled for Friday.
“All the lads were gutted we hadn’t won the first match, so some of the players went out,” captain and legendary hardman Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris tells FourFourTwo. “Some came back on time… some came back later.”
With the second showdown mere hours away, the late Peter Osgood – the talisman now immortalised outside Stamford Bridge in statue form – decided to take the edge off with Scottish winger Charlie Cooke and cult hero forward Tommy Baldwin.
“We were only having a few beers – they always say before the match you shouldn’t be drinking,” Baldwin tells FFT, beginning to chuckle. “That wasn’t really drinking, it was like having a mouthwash!”
Osgood wrote in his 2003 autobiography of demolishing a “conveyor belt of cocktails” in the sunshine that day, remembering it as “one of the few times I saw Alan Hudson refuse a drink”. No saint himself, mercurial midfielder Hudson had found his team-mates living it up and wasn’t impressed, reminding them of one of the biggest matches of their careers the following day. Osgood told him, “You go home, you have to do my running tomorrow. Don’t worry, young Huddy. I’ll win us the game.”
“It was unplanned, one of those things that creep up on you,” Cooke recalled in his own memoir. “A couple of snifters and the hours can flash by,
