“We were a very close squad, and we had to be – we only had three toilet seats…”
Aston Villa were in the quarter-finals of the European Cup when their finest ever team found themselves passing round in-demand bits of their hotel bogs.
Tony Morley bursts into laughter as he recalls a European adventure a long way from the glitz and glamour of today’s Champions League extravaganzas. Transported back to that last-eight clash at Dynamo Kyiv in March 1982, Villa’s top scorer in their historic march to glory describes a hotel so grotty that the lavatory seats were in short supply.
Villa’s squad moved a handful of circular sit-upons from room to room, sharing them with the care and attention they’d usually reserve for passing a football. And don’t get Morley started on the “f**king chicken soup”, or the bread roll his close friend Gordon ‘Sid’ Cowans dared to break open.
“It was a disgrace,” Morley grins in mock rage. “It was hot water poured over a raw chicken. I thought it was going to fly off my plate. I’d been all around the world eating meals with Sid, but not that one. I remember him saying, ‘I’m not eating that, I’ll just have a roll’. True story: he then opened his roll and a cockroach was in the middle of it. I yelled, ‘Eat it quickly before it runs away!’”
Ultimately, Villa’s 1981-82 tour of Europe would conclude with captain Dennis Mortimer getting his hands on the only souvenir Aston Villa coveted from their continental trips. That was just as well – these were certainly no sight-seeing city breaks.
“If anyone went behind the Iron Curtain in those days, they’d quickly want to come out,”
