Alan Brazil: After FA Cup heartache, my secret visit to Villa’s physio couldn’t clinch us the title

On this day in 1981, I woke up and winced at the discomfort from a groin injury.

But it was nothing compared to the pain of having lost an FA Cup semi-final the previous day.

My club, Ipswich Town, were going for a treble – the league, the FA Cup and the UEFA Cup.

We played Manchester City at Villa Park in the last-four of the oldest national football competition.

I ended up having a very strange five-day stay in the Midlands.

It included suffering the most-devastating defeat of my career, followed by playing a part in beating our biggest title rivals, thanks to some secret treatment from their physio.

Although 39 years have passed since we lost to City in extra-time, I still beat myself up when I think about the chance I passed up early in the game.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t score – I managed to miss the ball completely.

I’m putting my failure down to the fact that the pitch was a disgrace.

There was sand everywhere.

The ball came over to me from Arnold Muhren. I tried to get my foot over the ball to smash a volley down and into the net.

But the ball didn’t bounce at all because of the sand, and I totally miskicked.

After that, we had a number of other chances. We battered them.

Kevin Beattie had a header cleared off the line by Tommy Hutchison, I missed another one and so did Eric Gates.

Paul Power scored a free-kick in extra time and my hopes of playing in an FA Cup Final were over.

I’d grown up in Glasgow, dreaming of playing in the Scottish Cup Final at Hampden Park.

When my career took me to England, I was desperate to sample the showpiece at Wembley.

I was on the books when Ipswich beat Arsenal to win the trophy in 1978, but I didn’t make the team.

It seemed to me that 1981 was going to be my year and to lose the semi-final was a bitter blow.

Yes, there were tears.

Spurs would have been our opponents in the Final, and they won the Cup, thanks to Ricky Villa’s amazing goal.

I still maintain we would have beaten them because we had a great footballing side.

We didn’t have too much time to mope, however, because we were back at the same stadium on the Tuesday night to play Aston Villa in a game that was built up as a league title decider.

My wife was coming up to visit family, and the club let some of us stay in the area.

My problem was that dodgy groin.

How was I going to overcome injury if I wasn’t able to go into Portman Road for treatment?

I got chatting to a Villa physio, who said that if I came in early, he would try to help me out.

As you know, I’ve no problem getting out of bed early and I went to the ground unbelievably early.

He would have got the sack if anyone found out about him helping someone from their biggest rivals in the title race that season.

His work did the trick.

Eric Gates and I scored as we won 2-1.

We thought we’d got the win that would make us champions.

As I walked off the pitch, I saw the physio shaking his head.

He gave me a look that said: “Shut your gob, Brazil”.

I’m sure he thought he’d just blown it for his club.

Unfortunately, we lost three of our next four games and Villa took the title.

We just didn’t have enough players for our schedule of 66 competitive games. Villa played 20 fewer.

Fortunately, we beat Aris Salonika, Bohemians Prague, Widzew Lodz, Saint-Etienne, Cologne and AZ Alkmaar to win the UEFA Cup.

In the second leg of the Final against Alkmaar, we were on our knees and lost 4-2 after winning the home game 3-0.

Our centre-half, Russell Osman, was making his 68th outing of the season, having also played twice for England. I racked up 58 appearances.

Now we hear of modern managers and players recoiling at the idea of facing a packed programme of fixtures when football starts again.

Their huge squads would be playing games with virtually no tackling on perfect pitches and with the help of amazing sports science.

It’s a joke.