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Black Boots & Football Pinks: 50 Lost Wonders Of The Beautiful Game Daniel Gray, Bloomsbury, £9.99
REMEMBER when football divisions had proper names, scoreboards were pixelated and goalkeepers wore trousers and hats? Thought they were gone forever? Well think again.
Fifty taken-for-granted gems of Britain’s footballing past – including black boots, multiple cup replays, queueing for tickets and “football Pinks” – have been preserved for posterity in the eighth book by author and TV presenter Daniel Gray.
And, he reveals, the inspiration for this unabashed love letter to the beautiful game was born in Scotland.
Speaking from his Leith home, the Yorkshireman – who wrote the BBC2 series Scotch: The Story of Whisky and Slavery – tells iN10: “I was able to say what we have lost in England, being an Englishman living in Scotland.
“The nice thing is that I can go on a train across the central belt or further and see some very authentic football that still has remnants of these things – before they disappear altogether.
“Scotland has been great at not throwing too much away, although I don’t think it is going to last forever, hence the writing of this book.”
Middlesbrough supporter Daniel, 36, met his future wife Marisa, with whom he has a young daughter, in an Edinburgh nightclub 15 years ago after travelling north to watch a game. He decided to stay. But he thanks The Sunday Post for his childhood introduction to the country that is now his home.
“My Leeds grandmother read The Sunday Post and we used to read the cartoons – but we couldn’t pronounce them,” he laughs.
“They were my introduction to Scotland.”
Memories are clearly important to the Newcastle University graduate. He says: “Black Boots and Football Pinks came out 30 years after I went to my first Boro football match.
“There has been such rapid change. I wanted to mark that change and preserve it on paper. It is very nostalgic. Most of the things we have lost I am sad about – including the football Pinks.
“You’d have in your hand at half-past-five this warm, just-off-the-press newspaper with pictures from the match you’d just been to, the match report, and all the scores from up and down the country on the back.
“It’s quite a remarkable thing in this age of screens.”
The first lost wonder listed in this easy-to-read, dip-in-dip-out volume is multiple cup replays. It also features main-stand clocks, one-club men, and goal nets with personality.
He says: “The multiple cup replays were when teams used to play each other again and again in search of a result with no sign of penalties or anything like that.
“I just love thinking back and imagining how sick of the sight of each other the teams must have been.
“There is a chapter on disorganised warm-ups, when teams used to come out and do a few random stretches and kick the ball at each other a bit. Now it’s so regimented, with so many cones out and exercise regimes, you think: ‘where is all the fun of it gone?’
“And players don’t run on to the pitch any more – they just walk slowly and shake hands with each other. I miss that burst of drama.
“But the thing I really miss is stadium announcers just keeping quiet and letting the fans make their own atmosphere.
“However I’m not totally sad about all of them. My first season was the season of the Hillsborough disaster. It’s a lot safer to take my young daughter to matches than it was 30 years ago. A lot of what’s happened is good. It’s cleaner and the facilities are better.”
The writer admits that his greatest challenge was to see the game of yesteryear as it truly was, and not through “rose-tinted specs”.
And it has had its joys. “The highlight of writing this book has been just sitting and thinking about the past in a really concentrated way with the cat Homer next to me; the time machine in my head whirring,” he says. “I felt it was a really important moment in time for me personally and for football because we don’t know which direction the game is going to go with all the money that’s there.
“Every time you hear of a new big-money deal you ask yourself, why do I love this game still, but you do find deep down that yes you do, and that’s why you keep bothering.”
Ultimately, though, the writer had only one goal in mind. “I wanted to sketch the ghosts before they leave the room,” he says.
Back of the net, Daniel!