Book review - Got, Not Got

League ladders, World Cup Willie, Subbuteo, World Cup stamps, Sport Billy, inflatables, fanzines, Corinthian figures - whatever was the football fad that accompanied the era that you got into football, you'll find it all revisited in the wonderful book Got, Not Got.
With an alphabetical layout featuring the biggest 50 or so teams in English and Scottish football, there's a pretty good chance that a piece of memorabilia that means something to you or your team will be photographed and recalled in a superbly designed book that's feels like flicking through a massive 224-page football programme rather than a serious football text.
The book harks back to that golden era far away from Twitter, kick-offs being moved for TV, court cases and obscene wages, when Mark Lawrenson was just a Brighton defender and Gary Lineker worked on his dad's market stall.
The authors are big Leicester City fans and there's plenty of Foxes memorabilia across the pages. Norwich fans will be excited about page 132, half of which is dedicated to City's finest match, the 1993 win against Bayern Munich in the Olympic Stadium.
Before the Premier League and the wall-to-wall coverage of Sky, before mobile phones and tablets gave us goals around the clock, there was a time when the beautiful game was harder to access - a time when it didn't just flow over everyone and fill every corner.
That time when you had to go to a game to follow your team, you had to buy a programme, read a magazine or phone a Clubcall hotline to get your club's news, a time when the game we all love had collectable items that meant something to every young fan and a time when catching a five-minute glimpse of your team on television was a once-a-season event.
It's a great book, every page has a throwback memory for any football fan over 30 and you'll dip in and out of it for months on end as I have done.
Even though a lot of the references and pictures are slightly before my time, I still loved it and, hey, any football book with a picture of Brighton's Steve Foster in his early 80s headbanded glory will do for me!