The night Shola Ameobi introduced himself as a Newcastle hero

It’s strange to think there are football fans out there now who never knew the ugly majesty of the Intertoto Cup.

The competition only existed under UEFA’s auspices for a decade and a bit, being discontinued when the UEFA Cup – for which the Intertoto Cup winners qualified – was rebranded as the Europa League.

It was never the most glamorous – English clubs initially refused to take part, resulting in Tottenham fielding a phenomenally weakened team featuring players signed purely for the Intertoto Cup.

Nor was it the easiest to understand – multiple ‘finals’ were held, with the victors progressing to the UEFA Cup proper, and the Intertoto Cup’s de facto champion was the side that made it the furthest in the main competition.

But for all its flaws, it produced some memorable moments.

Pub quizzers will forever recall that Andriy Arshavin’s professional debut came against Bradford City in the early rounds of the competition, while Newcastle United supporters might remember a sunny August game which heralded the arrival of a young man who – like Arshavin at Zenit – would go on to become a local hero.

There is often a bizarre tendency for people to misremember the specifics of football matches over time.

Sometimes we remember a goal being scored from closer in or further out than the reality – this is something people mentioned to me after I wrote about Mario Stanic’s wonder-strike for Chelsea against West Ham – but there are occasions when the false memories run even deeper.

The subject was raised by my friend Billy MacFarlane in this article for The False Nine, where he explains the phenomenon like so: ‘The fallibility of memory is much more common than most of us think and it results not only in incidents which can be