I was the first man in Leicester to own a tank-top’ Frank Worthington will later boast, but it’s unlikely.  Football remained resolutely behind the times, like one of those provincial towns whose councillors banned mucky Scandinavian films that featured scenes of intimacy taking place.  Swinging sixties ? Not in Hartlepool , where pre-match meals are steak pie and chips , or Derby where County win the title - twice. 
For decades the kits are free of advertising and logos. They have only numbers, never names, as if the collective means more than the individual. Laundry ladies take them home to wash and iron. On Monday afternoons they flap on the washing-lines of houses in redbrick estates far from any golf course. Toilet rolls decorate the netting like the offerings on some pagan tree. And there’s the mud. Caked on players knees, smeared on their shorts where they wiped their hands to take a throw, streaked across their cheeks, mottling their chins. It was a dirty game back then in every sense.