Bribed in Brussels: How Nottingham Forest fell victim to fixing scandal

It is approaching 30 years ago now, but Paul Hart can still remember Brian Clough's demeanour in the dressing room at Anderlecht on the night Nottingham Forest found themselves up against 12 men. The most charismatic and outspoken manager of his, or possibly any, generation once told a room of Italian reporters he would talk to "no cheating bastards" after his Derby County side lost to Juventus in the semi-final of the European Cup. Now he just sat in a corner and barely said a word. "Just really quiet," Hart recalls. "Unusually quiet."

At Forest they always suspected their 3-0 defeat in the second leg of the Uefa Cup semi-final in April 1984 was fixed. The truth finally emerged in 1997 when the Belgian club admitted their former president, Constant Vanden Stock, had used a local gangster to pay the Spanish referee £18,000. Anderlecht were banned for a year from Uefa's competitions, which seems remarkably lenient in hindsight, but one of the great match-fixing scandals of its time still remains in the small print of the sport's history books.

"Maybe because we didn't make a great fuss," Hart suggests. "One of the things about Brian Clough's teams was that we were always taught never to complain to referees. So we just got on the plane afterwards and flew home. We had a game that weekend against Stoke City and we just got on with it." Clough does not even mention it once in either of his autobiographies.

Yet the story of what happened that night in Brussels is a stark reminder that football has always been vulnerable to match-fixing. Others, plainly, will have got away with it.

Clough's team had travelled to Belgium with a 2-0 lead from the first leg. "We battered them", as Hart puts it. Forest had already won three of their four away games in the competition, at PSV Eindhoven, Celtic and Vorwärts to reach that stage, as well as drawing against Sturm Graz in Austria. A third European final in six years was within reach.

Yet Clough was always uneasy about the appointment of Emilio Guruceta Muro as referee. The Spaniard was already getting a reputation after sending off two Italians and awarding Standard Liège a dubious penalty in a game against Napoli. Hart had his own concerns. "I remember saying to Kenny Swain I hope it's not the same guy we had when I was playing for Leeds in a tournament in Spain a couple of years earlier. That referee had sent off two of our players for no reason. Then we were waiting in the tunnel and there he was – the same guy."

A pattern of strange decisions was already taking shape when Enzo Scifo put Anderlecht ahead after 20 minutes. But Forest held out until the hour mark, when Muro ruled Swain had brought down Kenneth Brylle to give away a penalty. "Kenny must have been three yards away," Hart says. "It was a blatant dive anyway. But I can't stress this enough, Kenny was a mile off him. It could easily have been offside as well."

By that stage, the visitors were starting to fear the worst. Garry Birtles, coming back from injury, started on the bench with Clough. "He twigged it," Birtles said. "Those were his exact words. Before the match our dressing-room door was open. The referee's door was open and we could see Anderlecht officials going in an out."

It was to get even worse. Erwin Vandenbergh scored Anderlecht's third with two minutes left to put the home side ahead on aggregate for the first time. Then, in stoppage time, Forest won a corner. "I headed it as clean as a whistle," Hart remembers. "The ball flew past Ian Bowyer and into the net and that would have been us in the final. Their goalkeeper was already berating his defenders, and then the whistle went. Nobody had a clue why. I said to Ian: 'Were you offside? Did you push someone?' He said: 'Don't be silly.' But it was disallowed."

Birtles takes up the story. "Colin Walsh put over the corner and it was more or less a free header. There was no contact with a defender whatsoever. We were just looking at each other thinking: 'What on earth is going on here?' It was embarrassing. Your natural thought is not that it was a bent referee, but we knew we'd been done."

Up in the press box, they were just as bemused. John Wragg was covering the match as the Midlands correspondent for the Daily Express. "Clough was particularly angry on the touchline, which was unusual. He was jumping up and down and it was obvious he knew something was going on. This was back in the days when everyone mixed and after the game all the players and officials were together in one big room. Cloughie came up to the various journalists, kissed each of us on the cheek and said: 'Eh, you know we were cheated, don't you?'"

The BBC's Pat Murphy was also at the game and later wrote in His Way: The Brian Clough Story, that he had feared a riot. "The travelling army of Forest fans contained more than a few hotheads and at the end of match the atmosphere was poisonous." At the final whistle, Clough tried to defuse the situation by rushing on to the pitch to shake the referee's hand. "He no doubt wished he could shake his neck instead, but contented himself with a meaningful stare."

The truth came to light only after two people were arrested for apparently blackmailing Anderlecht out of hundreds of thousands of pounds not to reveal the story, having secretly taped the conversations with Muro. For the losers, it was no surprise. "The referee wouldn't even shake our hands," Bowyer recalls. "Cloughie came in and effectively told us that the referee was bent and we should just get out of there."

Forest would have played Spurs in the final, a team that finished five places behind them, 13 points worse off, in the First Division. "I never won a medal as a player, so it was a sickener," Hart says. "How can you put a price on a European medal? You can take losing fairly but when you know you have been cheated it's desperately unfair and wrong." He and his team-mates tried to sue, taking their case to Charleroi, but it was "lost in the annals of Belgian law". The footage of Hart's disallowed goal has also mysteriously disappeared.

Muro died in a car crash in 1987, aged 45, taking his secrets to the grave. As for Anderlecht, a group of their supporters did visit Nottingham a few years back to make their own apology. Yet the club have clearly never felt it necessary to change the name of the Constant Vanden Stock stadium, with son Roger taking over as president. Birtles occasionally has to go there for his television work. "Every time," he says, "it sticks in my throat."