News about Allan Clarke

MATT BARLOW: English football is back to its salami-slicer yet more. Ronnie Radford and the FA Cup's most recognizable target on the mud heap at Edgar Street are competing this time. As Allan Clarke's Scunthorpe United humbled Eddie Gray's Leeds United, he is Manchester City's pulsating battle back from 3-0 down with 10 men and a sprinter by Jon Macken at White Hart Lane and a raucous night under the Old Showground's corrugated iron roofs. And those transformal windfalls for clubs like Exeter City were saved from extinction thanks in part to a replay victory over Manchester United, which saw Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney move to Devon.

Trevor Francis, the first-ever £1 million player, has died on Friday. His conversion from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest was historic at the time, as a pre-cursor to the exorbitant sums we see today. So how has the transfer record in Britain evolved down the years and risen to the peaks we see today?

OLIVER HOLT: We used to wake up early on Saturday morning in May and sit in front of the TV to watch the team coaches as they edged through the crowd on Wembley Way and the players strolled out onto the impossibly vivid green turf. The Cup final was the most significant date in the English football calendar, and the competition provided some of the game's most memorable occasions for the generation that grew up loving the game in the 1970s and 1980s.

MATT BARLOW: The country ground came to a halt with the train workers and lorry drivers on strike, schools closed, inflation soared, politics collapsing, and football gorged on a gluttony of spending. This was February 1979 and the dog days of Discontent's winter. Nottingham Forest paid Birmingham City £1.18 million for Trevor Francis, less than a month after West Bromwich Albion had been the first to crack the £500,000 barrier. Chelsea's new US owners have returned to action, while football remains immune from the nation's highest cost of living crisis, as train drivers strike, schools close, and inflation rises. Some things don't change.