Crack, communism and Cork City

ONCE upon a time in the west, eastern European teams, no matter how good, could never be described as excellent or formidable or even - and this would have been particularly appropriate - well-marshalled.

Nope, by some unbreakable but unwritten rule, they had to be called 'crack'.

Remember? Teams from behind the Iron Curtain, especially ones with industrial sounding words like Dynamo or Lokomotiv in their name, were always "crack east Europeans."