I was five years old, desperately precocious when it came to football, and furious that my mam hadn’t let us watch England against Czechoslovakia in the 1982 World Cup. We were on holiday, and that meant that we had to brave the rain and wander through Fort William. Thankfully, Trevor Francis scored his winner just as we walked past a TV shop on the high street and I saw it live through the window.
That was the first thing I thought of when I heard that Francis had died this week. Your first World Cup always leaves the deepest impression, and Francis remained my footballing reference point. And yet, to look at the photographs that accompanied his obituaries was to be transported to another world, when kits came in blocks of simple colours, unsullied by corporate logos. But in one key respect, Francis was part of football’s future, not its past. In 1979, when he joined Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest from Birmingham City, he became the first British player to be transferred for £1 million.
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