‘That was one of the very few times I ever got a bonus for losing.” Vicente del Bosque pauses for a moment and then adds: “the very few…or the only.” It may seem unthinkable now, and it did not make it any easier to take then, but when Real Madrid travelled to Paris for the European Cup final in May 1981 they were expected to lose. So much so that when they did lose, the Spanish club still paid their players a 525,000 pesetas bonus. Even getting there had been an achievement. This was Madrid’s competition, the trophy that defines them, but they had not been in a final since 1966. Their opponents, by contrast, were playing their third final in five years.

Madrid’s opponents that night were the same side they will face in the Champions League on Wednesday – Liverpool – and Liverpool were to be feared. Madrid’s manager at the time, Vujadin Boskov, certainly feared them, which may be one of the reasons why Madrid lost. As Kenny Dalglish puts it, a twinkle in the eye belying the deadpan delivery: “Well, that’s good. Let’s hope the same thing happens next week.” Del Bosque is now the Spain manager; then he played in the middle of Madrid’s midfield. “The coach put us at Liverpool’s service,” he recalls. Everything Boskov did, he did to counteract Liverpool. It did not work.

This was an era that one Madrid player describes as “grey”; they were hugely successful domestically, winning the league in 1975, ’76, ’78, ’79 and 1980, but Europe resisted.

The presence of Mariano García Remón, Rafael García Cortés, Antonio García Navajas and Ángel García Pérez earned them the nickname the “Madrid of the Garcías”. It was a title, Del Bosque says, that was employed with a combination of aprecio y desprecio – fondness and dismissiveness.

The glamour was provided by their record signing: Laurie Cunningham, the West Brom winger, who arrived in 1979 for 180 million pesetas, £995,000. As one of the substitutes in the final, the defender Isidoro San José, recalls: “Madrid were all fight; Laurie was the fantasy.”

In fact, there was plenty of talent in the team: Carlos Santillana and Juanito were the greatest attacking threat, Uli Stielike played in midfield and alongside him, Del Bosque was all elegant strides and clever passing. But Boskov seemed not to trust the talent. Not against Liverpool, anyway. A month before, Madrid had been celebrating the league title on the pitch at Valladolid when news came through that a goal 15 seconds from full-time had given Real Sociedad the title instead and some players insist that the fear from that result was carried over into the European Cup final.

Injuries were certainly carried into it. García Remón was out, meaning that Agustín Rodríguez played in goal. Ricardo Gallego had only just got out of plaster and was in the stands. Stielike played despite a bad knee, and Cunningham, who had suffered a broken toe in November 1980, was not fit either. Like Stielike, he played anyway.

The decision to include Cunningham in the starting XI was perhaps the biggest mistake. He had not fully recovered from that toe injury. All he had played was 45 minutes in José “Pirri” Martínez’s testimonial the week before. Talk to his team-mates and the verdict is unanimous – Cunningham was not ready. He had not been there for the semi-final against Internazionale but Boskov seemed obsessed with him being there in Paris.

Boskov believed that Liverpool would be terrified of Cunningham. One report described him as “Madrid’s great hope” and Cunningham himself claimed that they were “worried about my reappearance – they know I am quick and have a good shot”. Political pressure may also have been among the reasons. In the buildup to the final, Cunningham took a call from a club director. He was not convinced of his player’s fitness; others were not convinced of his commitment, questioning his more pessimistic diagnoses and his pain threshold.

For Cunningham, who was 25 at the time of the final, the pressure was intense and it was about to get worse. The director delivered a stark warning: play the final or your career here is over.

Cunningham said that he felt “fine”, but he was in pain, his toe was still rigid. For a man for whom agility was essential, that destroyed him: the man who Ron Atkinson once declared could “run on snow and leave no footprint” could in fact barely run. He never felt right. That he had been forced to play troubled him as much as it troubled his team-mates. He described it as “horrific”.

As for Liverpool being frightened of him, that was not true either. They rarely seemed bothered by anything really, except the food. Liverpool stayed in the centre of Paris but never left the Meridian hotel. They had come with their normal plan – “get in, win, get out” – and with their normal luggage: tins of baked beans and bars of chocolate.

“We didn’t trust foreign food, it’s a wonder we weren’t on the toilet for a week,” Alan Kennedy recalls. “We were aware of Laurie but Bob Paisley, the manager, never really bothered with that. He’d just say: ‘Oh, he’s fast, he’s tricky’ and that was it. Liverpool never worried about any players and rarely planned anything. We just played.”

Madrid’s players recall standing in the tunnel, terrified, while alongside them Liverpool’s seemed only preoccupied with covering the Umbro sign on their shirts with masking tape, apparently not overly preoccupied with anything else. The Spanish just looked at them.

“They had a great team: McDermott, Souness, Dalglish, Kennedy … both Kennedys [Ray and Alan]!” Del Bosque remembers. Boskov thought so too. Madrid changed everything to try to combat Liverpool. José Antonio Camacho, later the Spain manager but back then a tough defender nicknamed the hacha brava, the axe, was told to man-mark Graeme Souness, leaving his position in the back four to take up a role in midfield, following the Scot everywhere and injuring him early on. “We effectively chose to play with 10 men, losing Camacho so that they lost Souness,” Santillana remembers.

It backfired. In part thanks to the switch, the game’s best chance fell to Camacho, too. Madrid would have preferred it to fall to almost anyone else: “I didn’t have a single shot,” recalls Santillana, the centre-forward. Camacho did. But, racing through, he floated his shot over Ray Clemence, and over the crossbar.

It was pretty much the only opportunity Madrid had in a dreadful final, one of the worst in living memory. Liverpool were not great, but Madrid were worse. It was ugly and occasionally brutal. Watching it now, it could have finished with seven v seven. In fact, there were just two bookings. It was also dull. The pitch at the Parc des Princes was full of holes and ridges, the grass long and dry, the passing almost embarrassingly bad. Dalglish admits that he barely recalls the game, but he does remember the surface. “The pitch was bad, the lines,” he says. “Was it used for rugby or something?”

Alan Kennedy was about the only player who Madrid did not mark. “How about Clemence, no?” Dalglish shoots back, adding: “Well, Kennedy was the left-back …” Not only that. As Kennedy himself puts it: “I wasn’t the prettiest player, and in fact I didn’t even expect to be playing – I’d broken my wrist in the buildup to the game.”

In the 81st minute , he dashed forward for a throw-in: “I felt like we would never score but I wasn’t trying to score. I was running to try to make space for others. Ray threw it to me. I ran into the area, García Cortés made a wild challenge on me and tried to take me and the ball out of the game. Agustin went to his left, thinking I would cross and…” Kennedy laughs. It seems absurd to him, even now.

García Cortés swung at the ball and missed, failing to make contact with anything or anyone. “I wasn’t trying to foul him; if I had I would have sent him flying but the pitch was a mess, there were little piles of chalk on it, they’d played rugby on it a bit before – and I missed,” he says now.

The mistake cost him dearly. Kennedy ran straight through and scored, continuing his incredulous run to the stand behind the goal. “Honestly, I didn’t know how to celebrate it. ‘What are you doing?’ I said to myself. Then I thought: ‘Did the referee blow? Did they rule it out? Was it allowed? Who’s running over? Did I really score?’” Kennedy continues: “I don’t remember there being any major celebration. After the game, knowing Bob, he probably just said: ‘Right, see you in July.’”

In the Madrid dressing room there were tears. Juan Santisteban was assistant coach. “There was anxiety, a need to win it,” he says. “The European Cup is the one you most want at Real Madrid at the start of every season and we were so close. They deserved a huge amount of credit for even reaching the final but when you lose, it is like something has been snatched away from you. That fact eclipses all else.”

Del Bosque insists that, with perspective, reaching the final has to be seen as a “success” for a team made up largely of products from the youth system. But still it hurt. When the forward Isidro described it as “the greatest disappointment of my life”, he spoke for everyone.

The club rewarded the players but the impact was huge. Madrid did not win the league again for six years, their worst run since the pre-Alfredo Di Stéfano era, and they had to wait until 1998 to return to the European Cup final and, 32 years since their last success, they at last won “their” trophy for a seventh time. The trophy that defined them had turned its back.

The 1981 European Cup final virtually ended Cunningham’s career at Madrid: he ended up playing in four different countries and at 10 clubs. When he signed for Sporting Gijón on loan in 1983, two long years later, he was asked if he could remember his last game. “The European Cup final?” he offered tentatively. He wasn’t far wrong.

Amid more injuries and bodged operations, he played just three times in the league in 1981-82. The season after that, he did not play at all: with Johnny Metgod joining Stielike as the second permitted foreigner at the Bernabéu, the Englishman was not even registered.

García Cortés always felt like it practically ended his Madrid career too. That air kick was never forgotten. His family had recorded the final for him. When he got home to Madrid, he took the tape from the video recorder and threw it out of the window.