This week's Match of the Day focuses on the Celtic v Aberdeen Scottish League Cup final at Hampden Park, looks back at three previous finals between the sides (all of which Aberdeen won) and highlights the sad history of goal nets at Hampden Park.
The first match is the 1976/77 Scottish League Cup final which featured a penalty from Kenny Dalglish in his last season in the hoops, an Aberdeen side on the ascendancy under Ally McLeod and the old Hampden nets pulled tight over the made-from-girders stanchions in all their imperial glory.
The sides met in the Scottish Cup final seven years later. Aberdeen, under Alex Ferguson, were then in their imperial pomp while the octogenarian Hampden Park was in freefall, best seen in the nets which now hung loose and randomly over the old hardware.
Sure, everything was still present and correct but something was lost at Hampden after the riot of 1980 and it never recovered.
By the Scottish Cup final of 1989/90 the Continental D's which had replaced the old stanchions in 1987 and which the blazers at the SFA no doubt thought trendy, were a great symbol of the Band Aids applied to the patient on life support.
While the old square goals had been installed when the old ground was first built and so were architecturally as one with the great bowl of an arena, the Continental D's were out of time and completely out of place.
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