HOWEVER UNFORTUNATE the events of 24 May 1972 were for Glasgow Rangers as a club, Scottish football and "Anglo"-Soviet relations at the height of the Cold War, the battle of the Camp Nou has managed to establish an almost mythical status over the years.

If you grew up with football in the 1970s then, with all due respect to those who administrated and policed at that time, the way in which Rangers' 3-2 European Cup Winners' Cup final victory over Dynamo Moscow ended was not really out of context. Those were times of pitch invasions, benign or otherwise, excessive drinking and a level of sport involved in jousting with the boys in blue - which ever country you were in.

But, romantics that we are, the story takes on a different hue with each passing year. Instead of a disgraceful pitched battle between drunken hooligans and local police which cost Rangers the defence of their trophy, damaged Scotland's reputation and caused 4,000,000 pesetas worth of damage to the Camp Nou, this game became remembered as the day the Glasgow Brigade lent a hand to their Catalan cousins by bashing the lights out of General Franco's Guardia Civil.

Then, as now, we knew how to tell a story. Scots and Catalans? Cousins under the thumbs of English and Francoist repression, right? Guardia Civil, notoriously brutal in subduing Catalan identity, language and sport? Scots to the rescue of their Catalan primos.

That's how the myth has grown over the years and, strangely, if you speak to some of the local witnesses and participants there is a marked unwillingness to outright criticise the estimated 11,000 Rangers supporters - even if the events of that May night evidently caught Barcelona and its football club in a state of unreadiness, naivety and shock.

Agusti Montal was the president of FC Barcelona at the time. Son of a great former president he was the man who signed both Johan Cruyff and Johan Neeskens and introduced the Barcelona Hymn' (Barca Barca Baaaarcca) chanted before each game as well as the branding "Mes que un club" - Barca is more than a club.

He recalls: "I remember it was brutal. I'd invited the then president of our neighbour club Espanyol, Manuel Meler, to sit with me in the presidential box but at the end we had to run for cover because there was this hail of objects being thrown from above, below, left and right. Before we had to escape in fear of serious injury I could just see our stadium being ripped apart so that the fans could find things to throw. It was terrible."

The referee that night was José María Ortiz de Mendíbil, a native of Bilbao who was well thought of and who later became famous in Spain for his weekly TV analysis of the most contentious footballing incidents. A kind of Basque Andy Gray, as opposed to Andy Gray in a basque. Anyway, Mendibil admits he didn't feel in the least threatened by the invading Glaswegian hordes.

"There was no violence in the game and I can honestly say that I knew the pitch invasion was just a spontaneous outpouring of joy rather than anything menacing at first," he said. "It began as an uncontrollable moment of happiness when they thought the game had finished and then when it actually did. But, of course, it quickly deteriorated into vandalism and an outright battle - total chaos.

"I have to say that as the referee I never felt threatened or under pressure and in retrospect I have to compliment the two sets of players who reacted calmly and in sportsmanlike fashion.

To me that's especially true of the Russians because in my experience any other team which was 3-2 near the end of an important cup final when there was a minor and then major pitch invasion would have instantly demanded a replay.

"Of course the summary has to include the truth that the major factor was Scottish drunkenness to a degree I'd never witnessed before or since."

Poor old Pablo Porta, then president of the Catalan football federation, had pushed hard for the Camp Nou to host this event at a time when Franco's steely grip on Catalunya was diminishing.

FC Barcelona was seen as a tool for re-establishing rather than simply keeping alive Catalan nationalism.

"The image I'll never forget" he recalls, "was of a cop who was being dragged off by members of the Red Cross with his head badly split open by a bottle wound and cerebral matter trickling down his nose - it was an horrific spectacle.

"I'm not sure I understand why the police reacted so passively, so slowly and then so aggressively when the situation was already out of their control. It was a bit of a boxing match between the Scots and the cops and I'd say that the UK media coverage blew that a bit out of proportion later."

Unlike Rangers - the Cup Winners' Cup holders who were not properly presented with their trophy and prevented from defending it - the aftermath of that night for FC Barcelona was largely positive.

Montal, their crafty past president, explains: "There was extensive destruction of the stadium but FC Barcelona didn't pay a peseta of the repairs. Uefa paid the four million pesetas and we began the installation of plastic seating, which laid the basis for our remodelled stadium in the 1982 World Cup.

"The police shipped the Rangers fans out as quickly as possible, pushing them on to the 70 charter flights whether they had flown to Barcelona or not! The result was that for weeks afterwards I would drive to my office at the Camp Nou and pass dozens of cars with Scottish licence plates stranded in the streets around the stadium.

"It all ended rather sadly in that the Provost of Glasgow invited me and my wife to come to the city a couple of months later as a gesture of reconciliation between the two cities.

We had reached as far as London on our journey to Scotland when word reached us that John Mains had died. I never did get to meet him."