In my day, we used to give kids a chance

IF Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen were looking for a fifth member my old man would be in with a shout.

You know the sketch. In our day we had a house and the roof was full of holes.

A house? You were lucky. We lived in a cardboard box.

A cardboard box? You lucky so ’n’ so.

We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for 14 hours a day etc.

My old man had his own Easterhouse version.

We were so poor we only had a candle for heating, he says. When it got really cold we’d light it ...

Talk about getting on your wick.

He once told me his shoes went missing one December.

He thought they’d been nicked, only to tear off the wrapping paper on Christmas morning to find his old gutties in a box with half a dozen nails hammered through each sole.

Santa had brought him - or at least adapted - a pair of football boots.

It’s easy to look back through rose-tinted beer goggles but when you hear Andy McLaren speak about football being a middle-class sport now it’s easy to see his point.

These days you pop along to a kids’ training session and the car park is packed full of giant 4x4s owned by folk who think going off road is parking in the driveway.

The youngsters have boots that glow in the dark like they’ve been dipped in radioactive sludge and cost more than our first motors.

Parents stump up fortunes each week for 4G surfaces softer than the most sumptuous of shag piles to save little Sebastian and Silvia from suffering skint knees.

Changed days. Way back working-class kids were happy to run around a death trap of an ash park chasing a Mitre Mouldmaster. We’d be content with our Patrick Kevin Keegan boots and any pal who strode out in a pair of Puma Kings was hailed as a tribal chief. They were simpler times.

They were also cheaper times. Our cash-strapped folks didn’t need to break the bank to let us play with local boys’ clubs. They were run on goodwill and fumes.

People carriers? No chance. One of the lads would have a decorator dad and the team would pile into the back of his van and sit on paint pots.

Former Dundee United man McLaren fears we’re losing talented players due to the cost of playing the game nowadays.

He knows better than anyone. He’s been on the airwaves and in these pages talking about the work he does with charity A&M who are getting poor kids involved in football.

These kids might have bags of ability but their parents can’t afford to pay £10 or £20 a week for training, plus all the kit, when they run a house

Parents can’t afford to pay £10 or £20 a week for training

on about £80 a month. Scotland could be missing out on the next Kenny Dalglish because his family have to decide between buying swanky boots or putting spaghetti hoops on the table.

It’s depressing. Especially to those who played alongside players from backgrounds where their families didn’t have a pot to piddle in.

Sure, some fell by the wayside. Some hit the bevvy or drugs and slid away, while others broke the mould. But at least they had a choice.

If we price kids out, they don’t have a choice. Football used to give kids a route out of poverty, now it slams the door on them.

The government and SFA have to figure out how to do make our national sport as inclusive as possible.

Otherwise we’d be as well taking the nails out my old man’s boots and hammering them into Scottish football’s coffin.