In their first attempt they knocked over one of the National Soccer League's great powerhouse teams in the Final.

A year later they repeated the feat - beating future three time Cup winners Adelaide City to the crown - and remain the only side to retain the National Cup in any of its three guises.

But the biggest question facing City supporters today is - what happened to the Phillips Cup? Since City raised it in 1977 and 1978, the location of the silverware remains a mystery.

The disappearance of trophies is not a new problem in sport - although it appears to be particularly endemic in football. The disappearance and subsequent recovery of the Jules Rimet Trophy by Pickles the Dog in 1966 is the archetypal, most prominent example but that is certainly not the only case.

David Corbett shows where his dog 'Pickles' found the Jules Rimet Cup in a suburban London garden

The Rugby League World Cup was stolen from a Bradford hotel in 1970, and although eventually found in a nearby ditch by a member of the public, the trophy wasn't claimed for many years leading to it almost being remodelled as a body building trophy.

Pickles’ good work was eventually undone in 1983 when the original Jules Rimet was stolen in Brazil, never to be recovered. That trophy supposedly suffered the same fate as the original FA Cup that Aston Villa lost in 1895, which was purportedly melted into coins and dispersed - another trophy lost to the annals of history.

Villa are serial offenders when it comes to careless stewardship of football’s most storied awards, after they also contrived to lose the 1982 European Cup during an unofficial tour of a local pub. That story does have a happy ending though, when the silverware was handed in to police in Sheffield - 100 miles from where it was lost.

This malaise of mislaid trophies even permeates the Australian sporting scene. The original Australian national knockout tournament trophy, the septennial Australia Cup of the 1960’s - arguably the instigator of the National Soccer League - was lost for decades, reportedly turning up in a rubbish bin at the Hakoah Club in Sydney during 2011 redevelopment works.