Non-league / Alex Lee / 30 March 2012 /

Way back in the 70s Kettering Town were the first English club to adopt a shirt sponsor, so to celebrate the fact that Betfair will be the club's shirt sponsors this weekend we asked 70s crooner Alex Lee to tell us what football used to be like.

Massive hair, tiny shorts

It was as if punk never happened as far as 70s footballers were concerned, with most of them looking like ShowaddyWaddy wannabes and the rest of them like rejects out of Boney M, except, sadly, without the ability to dribble in time to The Rivers of Babylon. The only players without massive hair were those who had gone prematurely bald and did their best to hide the fact with Bobby Charlton comb-overs. The late 70s in particular saw footballers' barnets go totally Hair Bear Bunch, with bubble perms being the 'do' of choice for the masses. Daftest of all, however, was the bigger the hair got, the shorter and tighter the shorts became. It's true. Anyone with a video from the 1979 FA Cup final will testify.

White boots

Until the 1970/71 season there were only two types of football boot - Adidas from German sportwear genius Adi Dassler and Puma made by his upstart little brother Rudi. Furthermore, there was only one colour too - black. Until, that is, Alan Ball turned up for the 1970/71 Charity Shield wearing a pair of shiny new white ones. While Ball must be praised for his boot bravery, the bottom line is that no colour goes well with ginger hair and the boots, which he described as being as uncomfortable as cardboard, simply looked ridiculous. If nothing else, they put sports manufacturer Hummel in the limelight for the first time, but even now when boots are all the colours of the rainbow it's only the very, very brave who choose white.

Muddy pitches

Every ground in the 1970s, not just Wimbledon's infamous long-closed ramshackle home, should have been called Plough Lane. This isn't because the vast majority of pre-Taylor Report stadia were disjointed wood and concrete jungles like Wimbledon's stadium of yore, but due to the fact that every pitch was like a ploughed field. Old people hark back to when kids used to play football on the street. There was good reason for this as the average back lane offered a truer playing surface than the mudbaths of the 1970s where the only playable surface in those days seemed to be Wembley. Is it any wonder everyone got so excited about reaching the FA Cup final in those days?

Dirty fouls, lenient refs

The 1970s were the day of the dirty player and the soft referee. Every team had to have a hard man, with most formations reading 4-hard man-3-2. The likes of Leeds' Billy Bremner and Norman 'Bites Yer Legs' Hunter, Chelsea's Ron 'Chopper' Harris, and Forest's Kenny Burns all plied their dirty trade in the 1970s, leaving their stud marks and elbow marks all over their opponents. To make matters worse, fouls which would bring on five match bans these days went unpunished, with the ref waving play on and muttering, 'It's a man's game' under his breath. Look on Ebay today and you'll still find hundreds of pristine yellow and red cards from the 1970s on sale.

Old school hooliganism

While designer clothes, Smartphones and pre-arranged meetings away from the stadium are de rigeur these days, hooliganism of the 1970s largely consisted of spontaneous pitch invasions with the culprits wearing flares, snorkel parkas and scarves tied around their wrists. No game was complete without at least one mass pitch invasion or a large-scale 'rumble' on the terraces where taking the opponents' end, nicking their scarves and setting them on fire later was just as satisfying as winning the match.

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