When we faced Real Madrid's stars of the 1960s

While our Champions League clashes in 2006 automatically spring to mind whenever ourselves and Real Madrid are mentioned in the same sentence, the history between the sides stretches much further.

You have to go back past our double-winning sides of the 1990s and 1970s, and indeed England's 1966 World Cup triumph, to get to the first encounter between the teams, when Madrid were the biggest team in Europe and had won the European Cup in each of the first five seasons it had been staged.

During the summer of 1962 the reigning Spanish champions announced that they would be undertaking a tour of Great Britain later in the year, which turned out to be games against Celtic on September 10 and ourselves three days later.

Despite having gone almost a decade without a trophy, we were still the side that foreign teams wanted to play against, even more so with Billy Wright now at the helm to herald a new era. However, Wright found out that managing a top club side was somewhat more difficult than the England youth team that he had previously been in charge of. 

Having won the first two games of the season, his team then hit an awful run of form by losing five and drawing one of the next six. On top of this, a number of players were unhappy - none more so than midfield star George Eastham, who had proclaimed that he would never play for us again. David Court had made his first-team debut on the Monday before the Real Madrid game as Eastham's replacement, and kept his place for the prestigious friendly.

Madrid, who had surprisingly crashed out of the European Cup to Belgian champions Anderlecht in the preliminary round, beat a tough Celtic team 2-1 on Monday, then travelled down to Highbury for the game on Thursday, and they gave us a lesson in how to play the beautiful game.

Despite being well-advertised in the matchday programmes leading up to the game, only 32,574 turned up - many fans were probably put off by a hike in the admission price.

Arsenal started brightly with full-back Eddie Magill and winger Johnny MacLed forcing saves from Jose Araquistain in the visiting goal, but then Madrid took control of the game. Amazingly, we kept Madrid at bay in the first half, which finished goalless once Antonio Ruiz had seen a goal disallowed.

Real made four substitutions at half time - something that wasn't looked upon favourably by the press, with Bill Holden of The Daily Mirror calling them "stupid and utterly unnecessary". The great Francisco Gento set the tone for the second half when he also had a goal disallowed, and then finally broke the deadlock in the 63rd minute. 

Alfredo Di Stefano [above] had by now taken control of the game, his work-rate belying his 36 years. Gento drove home a second goal six minutes later and Ferenc Puskas, the other veteran of the team, put the game beyond doubt with 10 minutes remaining. Yanko Daucik finished the scoring soon after, leaving the Spaniards enough time to entertain the crowd with an array of flicks and tricks that bordered on arrogance. 

Such was Real's dominance, free-scoring Joe Baker wasn't given a sniff at goal as he was shadowed all night by defender Jose Santamaria - whose nickname was 'The Wall'.

LINE-UPS

Arsenal: McKechnie, Magill, McCullough, Neill, Brown, Snedden, Macleod, Court, Baker, Barnwell, Skirton.

Real Madrid: Araquistain (Vicente), Casado, Miera, Muller, Santamaria, Pachin (Zaco), Ruiz (Daucik), Amancio, Di Stefano, Puskas, Gento (Casado, Ruiz).