Trevor Francis played an important part of my early life. No, I’m not a Birmingham city fan or a fan of any the clubs he played for. But he contributed a large part of my interest in football, let me explain.

I was a right scoundrel as a kid, we all were because we lived in poverty we got our fun where we could. One of those ways was sneaking into football grounds, and in Brum we had 3 to choose from. So I got pulled into that routine, although I hadn’t really had much interest in football. Dads normally do that sort of thing at a very early age, but I had got to the age of about ten and for me football was something that was simply an option, not a passion. That all changed one day at St Andrews the ground of Birmingham City, although by then I was already an West Brom fan as I say it wasn’t a passion. As a gang of kids somewhere between two and twenty of us would travel to the ground of Albion, Villa or The Blues to sneak in between the legs of people paying at the turnstiles. On this day it was Blue and once in the ground someone somehow got a football programme, and we started seeing who we knew in the team. These were names we knew off the TV of course, but at the Blues we also knew Gary Pendry because his parents lived down the road from us and at least once we knocked on the door for a signature.