His book 'Looking for the Toffees' is available from August 14

Viner looks back at the Toffees stars from the 70s compared to the Goodison heroes of today

By the time I entered my teens, in 1975, my greatest desire was to attend a First Division football match. Specifically, one at Goodison Park.

Five years earlier, Alan Ball, Howard Kendall and Colin Harvey, had propelled Everton to the League title. They were outstanding midfield players collectively known as the ‘Holy Trinity’ and in keeping with their nickname, I worshipped them from afar. It had to be from afar because my dad wouldn’t take me.

He thought that with hooliganism becoming more rampant by the week, a big football crowd was no place for a child. ‘Over my dead body,’ he would say, when I pleaded with him to change his mind.

Moneyball: Latchford's £10,000 goal against Chelsea was a huge moment for all Everton supporters in 1978

They were unwittingly prescient words. In February 1976 he died, suddenly, from a heart attack, leaving just my mother and me. That April I went to Goodison for the first time, with family friends, to see Everton play Arsenal. It was a drab 0-0 draw, but far from putting me off, I felt instantly and beguilingly part of a brotherhood.

By the following summer I had saved the princely sum of £40 to buy my first season ticket, for the 1977-78 campaign. And when the envelope arrived containing that precious blue booklet, I felt much as King Arthur might have, had someone obligingly posted the Holy Grail through his letterbox.

For the next three seasons, until I went off to university, I stood in the Gwladys Street End, just behind a rusting stanchion to which a frizzy-haired character known to us all as Fozzie Bear used to cling, leading us in song.

Occasionally, other men in the crowd would start a chant, but a strict hierarchy prevailed. You were either a chant-starter or you weren’t, and most of us weren’t.

One Saturday afternoon, during a second-half lull against Aston Villa, my friend Rafe intrepidly chanced his arm, bellowing ‘Give us an E’. But nobody did give him an E. Certainly not Fozzie. Not even me.

Rafe was one of five fellow- Evertonians, all of us from the genteel seaside town of Southport, a few miles north of Liverpool, with whom I travelled to matches both home and away. I never wanted for friends, yet there was no need for a psychoanalyst, then or now, to understand how, to a fatherless only child, thousands of sweaty strangers seemed to metamorphose into cherished extended family when we all bounced up and down, singing ‘Bobby Latchford walks on water, nana nana na, nana na na!”

If I had a personal anthem as a 16-year-old, that was it. Some of my school friends were wedded to the works of Genesis or Queen, but I needed no other musical refrain to elevate my soul to a higher, happier realm. And almost the same spiritual result was achieved with ‘We all agree, Duncan McKenzie is Magic’, and ‘Andy is our King’.

Those chants bespoke an Everton performance of attacking verve, as the centre-forward Latchford and the gifted maverick McKenzie stormed forward, to the left of them the scintillatingly brilliant winger Dave Thomas, and behind them the Luton larrikin, King.

To King’s left glided the ever- elegant Martin Dobson, so ineffably debonair he looked as if he should have played football in a velvet smoking jacket. But when Everton were on the back foot, and became reliant on their handsome Scottish goalkeeper, George Wood, another cry rose from the terraces, and where it erred in punctuation, it resounded with demonic conviction: ‘Scotland’s, Scotland’s, number one! Scotland’s! Number one!’

Pride: Brian Viner's son Jose, then eight years old, was a mascot for an Everton game at Goodison Park

I have carried my passion for Everton into my 50s, but it has never burned brighter than it did then. So when I was asked to write a book about my childhood heroes, finding out what life was like for them then, and the sometimes upsetting stories of what has become of them since, I embarked on an unexpectedly emotional journey, full of surprises.

For example, Latchford now lives in rural isolation near Nuremberg. He has a German partner and a young son devoted to Bayern Munich who, if he goes on to score international goals like his old man, will score them for Germany rather than England.

I focused on the men who played in two memorable games six months apart. One was the 6-0 demolition of Chelsea on the penultimate day of April, in which Latchford scored the two goals he needed to reach 30 for the season, bagging him a £10,000 prize from a national newspaper, which we on the Gwladys Street celebrated as if he’d won us 10 grand each.

The other was a 1-0 defeat of Liverpool, in October, that marked Everton’s first win in a Merseyside derby for seven long, painful years.

In one of the most economically blighted of English cities, about to head into the so-called Winter of Discontent, which was so traumatic on Merseyside that even grave diggers went on strike (causing the city council to draw up plans for people to ‘make their own arrangements’), football offered pure, unadulterated escapism.

And how we escaped that day, those of us on the Blue side of the divide.

Everton’s manager at the time was a lugubrious-looking son of Staffordshire called Gordon Lee, and when I started researching my book I had no idea whether he was still alive. Happily he was, aged 79 and living in contented retirement on the Fylde coast. Football, he told me, had treated him pretty well. Not so some of his old charges.

Mick Buckley, who supplied the cross from which Latchford scored the first of his goals on that famous afternoon against Chelsea, ended up alcoholic and destitute, sometimes sleeping rough. While I was writing the book, he died of cancer, beyond the help even of the Everton Former Players Foundation.

It was unutterably poignant for me to recall the vitality and optimism that men such as Buckley represented to us on the terraces, and how in some cases it had fizzled out. His was the most extreme example, but ill-fortune comes in different guises.

One of Buckley’s Everton teammates was Dave Jones, who would have to deal with trumped-up charges of sexual abuse. Another was Mike Pejic, a fine, rampaging left-back, indeed an England international, whose life caved in when his career was ended by a double hernia.

‘I spent two years in a black hole, emotionally,’ he told me. ‘I had a breakdown, didn’t know where to turn. I wasn’t getting any help from anyone. Then one day the head-mistress at the primary school my kids went to asked me if I’d take the kids for football. I turned up on the first day shaking like a leaf, but I did that for a year, and eventually put a school team together.

‘That got me back into football, and then a friend of mine asked me to help him in his business, so I wound up working Liverpool market three times a week. Gradually, I pieced my life back together. Luckily, I had my PFA pension, and to this day that helps considerably. Without that, I would have gone.’

I asked him what he meant by that: would have gone where?

‘Gone. Well, gone.’

Did he mean he would have harmed himself?”

‘Well, yeah. Gone.’

Killed himself?

‘Yeah.’

Good read: Brian Viner's Looking for the Toffees is available from www.mailbookshop.co.uk from August 14

LOOKING FOR THE TOFFEES Looking for the Toffees by Brian Viner is published by Simon & Schuster on August 14 at £16.99. Copy-right 2014 Brian Viner. To order a copy for £14.99 (incl p&p) visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk. Advertisement

Some of my childhood heroes, such as George Wood, Dave Thomas and Martin Dobson, had more uplifting tales to tell. But again and again I was reminded of the astounding gulf between footballers’ lives then and now. Dobson’s club car in 1978 was a Lada, which repeatedly broke down.

He could only get it going by belting the engine-block with a hammer. Wiping away tears of mirth, he recalled high-fiving his team-mate George Telfer because they’d managed to get his Lada started.

Training-ground car-parks look strikingly different now, of course.

But all the ex-players I interviewed were perfectly sanguine about the unimaginable riches now on offer, and happy to have played when they did. ‘The way I look at it, I had more than the lads before me,’ said Andy King, the man who scored that unforgettable goal against Liverpool in October 1978. ‘Mind you, I did an old players’ event the other week with Latchy. He’s in Germany, you know, with this young bird. Real gentleman, Latchy. But he lives off what he’s got, which isn’t a lot.

Kevin Campbell (who played for Everton from 1999 to 2005) was at the same do, and he looked a million dollars. He was wearing a Rolex watch that was worth me and Latchy put together. I said to Latchy, “We need to nick that, Latchy. You chin him and I’ll nick it”...’

I interviewed King, now 58 but plainly as irrepressible as ever, at Sixfields Stadium, the home of Northampton Town, where he was acting manager. And he told me that, for all the wholesale changes in the game, he still sees players falling headlong into the same trap that ensnared him years ago.

Contrast: It's a very different world now, exemplified by the £28million deal for Romelu Lukaku

‘You know, I should be sitting here talking to you now with as many games for Everton as anyone, and England caps too,’ he said. ‘But I gambled, and that got the better of me. I gambled away my wages, and then I started borrowing against my wages. That’s why I had to leave Everton.

‘I should never have gone (to QPR) in a million years. And before (me), it got the better of a great man, Alan Ball. I was told he had to leave Everton because of gambling debts.

‘No, it’s my one great regret in life, all that. And if I catch a kid now, I’m hard on him. I sit him down and say, “I’ve met more women, drunk more pints and spent more money in the betting shop than you ever will, so don’t think you can pull the wool over my eyes”.

‘If you drink too much, you can put a bin-bag on and sweat it out. You go to the pub with £100 in your pocket and spend £40 and you’re drunk. But you go into the bookies with £10,000 in your pocket and lose every penny, so for me, that’s the worst of the drugs.’

It was moving, getting this burst of heartfelt sincerity from a man whose default setting was gag-a-minute chirpiness. I asked him when he had finally managed to kick his own corrosive gambling habit?

He regarded me solemnly across the table, with just the hint of a twinkle in his blue eyes.