Notorious match-fixer Solti’s game of fine margins echoes down the years | Jonathan Wilson

Liverpool’s meeting with Inter will conjure memories of 1965’s controversial semi-final – and the man behind that

For Liverpool, Wednesday’s Champions League tie against Internazionale will inevitably conjure memories of 1965. Leading 3-1 from the first leg of their first European Cup semi-final, Liverpool went to San Siro and lost 3-0 in a game that players insist was fixed. The first Inter goal was scored direct from a free-kick they believed to be indirect, the second after the ball was nicked from the goalkeeper Tommy Lawrence as he bounced it before clearing.

The evidence in that instance is circumstantial, although as Brian Glanville noted in an investigation into match-fixing in the Sunday Times almost a decade later, Italian sides did remarkably well when the referee who officiated that game, José María Ortiz de Mendíbil, was in charge. There had been some very strange decisions as well in the previous year’s semi-final when Inter had beaten Borussia Dortmund, but the first concrete evidence of fixing came the following year.