When every game kicked off at three o’clock on a Saturday

Three o'clock. All of them. Every division, every Saturday, and if you wanted to know what was happening anywhere else you waited.

That is genuinely hard to explain to anyone under forty. There was no second screen, no notifications, no vidiprinter running in the corner of your eye. There was a chap with a transistor radio pressed to his ear three rows in front, and you watched his face.

How you actually found out

Half-time scoreboards with letters pegged up beside a fixture list in your programme. A ripple of noise going round the ground that meant somebody's rival had conceded, and you had to work out whose from the direction it came.

Then the classified results at five o'clock, read in that very particular voice where you knew the result from the intonation before the second number arrived. Then Match of the Day, hours later, edited down to two or three games. If your team wasn't on, you saw nothing until the local paper on Monday.

Why it ended

Television money, mostly — live coverage needs games spread across the weekend, and the 3pm Saturday blackout in England exists precisely to protect attendances at the games that aren't being broadcast. So the top games moved to lunchtime, teatime, Sunday, Monday night.

And travelling supporters got the worst of it, because a Monday night away game two hundred miles up the motorway is not a day out, it's an ordeal.

What was actually better

Everybody finishing at the same time. Every table honest at ten to five, no game in hand, no waiting for Sunday to know where you were. The whole country doing the same thing in the same three hours.

What was worse: the terraces in the seventies and eighties, the state of the toilets, the fencing, and the way an away end was treated. Nobody who was actually there wants all of it back.

Just the three o'clock bit.