Yup, sports fans, it's true: You can keep your 1970 World Cup Final and your 2005 Champions League Final (both of which remain personal favourites). For pure drama, incident and classic action, none can compare to this one. So here, for your scroll-past-it-to-read-the-Tom-Jones-story-two-posts-down-instead pleasure, is the full story of that amazing game...
Sampdoria, a quiet club with a dodgy badge from the pirate-swarming rivers of Genoa (that's them in the faux-vintage photo), weren't expected to do very much in the 1990/91 Italian domestic soccer season. The league that year contained such luminaries as AC Milan (with their Gullit-Van Basten-Rijkaard trio of Dutch superstars), Inter Milan (with their own German troika of Klinsmann-Brehme-Matthaus), and Napoli (for whom Maradona was on a post-World Cup vengeance mission).
And while the other teams' superstars (Skuhravy, Brolin, Alemao, Voller, the list goes on) were all on a roll after the 1990 FIFA World Cup, Sampdoria's only decent player was Gianluca Vialli, who'd flopped horrendously at Italia 90.
So of course - for this is, you see, a football fairytale - Sampdoria played out of their skins, leading the charge over the course of an utterly epic season.
Late in May, as the championship reached its climax, Sampdoria travelled to Inter Milan. Inter needed a win; Sampdoria needed Inter not to win. Here, after the highlights of the reverse fixture earlier in the season (see, I told you it was an obscure game - it's hidden deep in the bowels of YouTube) is what happened:
The game had it all: crazy misses, blinding saves, a disallowed goal, two red cards, a missed penalty, goal-line clearances, two great goals, crowd violence and (this bit's not in the clip) Sampdoria's goalkeeper getting clunked on the head by a wayward firecracker.
As Rob Smyth recalls in his excellent piece at The Guardian, "this was the definitive smash-and-grab victory. Inter had 24 shots to Samp's six. They had 13 corners to Samp's one. The Inter keeper Zenga didn't make a single save; Pagliuca made 14, including, unthinkably, a penalty from Matthäus. He had the game of his life."
Listening to the commentary, it sounds like Martin Tyler is in tears at one point. As I recall, everybody who saw the game was.