Anyone seeking to devise a fiendishly difficult football quiz could do worse than set a series of questions relating to events at Stamford Bridge on 17 December 1983.

Samples might include: which of the two managers is now in charge of Ozone FC in India? For bonus points can you name the number of countries and clubs he has coached since leaving England? Or how about: please name the goalscorer who would go on to be awarded an MBE after setting what was a Football League appearances record?

Hats off to those who can identify Dave Booth, the Grimsby Town manager who masterminded a 3-2 win against their promotion rivals Chelsea in the old second division on an afternoon when his side had been 2-0 down with an hour gone. Watched by a crowd of 13,151, it was one of only four league defeats suffered by the late John Neal’s team as they headed for the title and a first return to England’s top flight since 1979.

Booth, now 70 and coaching second-tier Ozone FC in Bangalore, would end up in fifth place with Grimsby that season. He was a product of Wakefield’s famous Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, where he played rugby and cricket and was particularly fascinated by geography lessons.

That perhaps explains why he resigned from managing Grimsby in 1985 to run an overseas property-development business, returning to UK for a brief stint at Darlington before becoming a confirmed expatriate in 1996.

Since kicking off an itinerant coaching career with a side in Brunei playing in the Malaysian League, Booth has since managed 13 clubs in six more countries – India, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, the Maldives and Vietnam – in addition to two national sides: Myanmar and Laos.

As for the goalscorer, the answer is Tony Ford MBE, who struck the 77th-minute winner after a Kerry Dixon penalty and a goal from John Bumstead had seen Chelsea canter into a deceptively comfortable-looking lead. The tide began turning in the 65th minute when Joe Waters reduced the deficit, before Paul Emson’s equaliser and Ford’s decider.

Ford made a record 931 league appearances with nine clubs – including a brief loan at Sunderland – over a career which began as a 16-year-old flying winger with Grimsby and concluded as a 42-year-old right-back at Rochdale.

In December 1983 Ford’s youthful pace helped destabilise a strong home XI including Dixon, Eddie Niedzwiecki, Paul Canoville, John Hollins, Nigel Spackman, Pat Nevin, David Speedie.

Incredible as it may seem today, Canoville and Ford were the first black players to appear for Chelsea and Grimsby respectively. By then both had become depressingly accustomed to the racist abuse, banana-throwing included, that was commonplace at English football grounds in those days but in interviews over the years Ford has said he either “blanked it out” or “ignored it”. He had little choice. Kick it Out did not exist, social attitudes were very different and the idea that footballers might consider walking of the pitch in protest would have been unthinkable.

Chelsea’s Eddie Niedzwiecki celebrates at Blundell Park after the visitors sealed the Division One title. Photograph: Hugh Hastings/Chelsea FC via Getty Images

If things have, largely, changed for the better off the pitch, that victory remains a highlight of Ford’s 931 games. “The most important goal of my career was that winner at Stamford Bridge,” he says. “It wasn’t my best goal but we were going for promotion to the first division and we came from behind to win.”

Despite remaining in the top three for most of the second half of that season, Grimsby could not quite secure promotion, finishing fifth on the final day. Exacerbating their pain was the fact that their visitors that afternoon were Chelsea, who exacted revenge for the 3-2 with a title-clinching 1-0 victory in front of 13,000 fans at Blundell Park courtesy of Kerry Dixon’s 34th goal of the season.

“I can’t recall the December game at Stamford Bridge,” said Nevin on Tuesday. “But I recall that season’s match-up at Grimsby very well!”

If it was of little consolation to Booth’s team that fans in north Lincolnshire had enjoyed their best League campaign since 1934-35, when Grimsby finished fifth in the first division, at least they did not know how different the two clubs’ subsequent trajectories would be.

Michael Jolley’s League Two class of 2019-20 arrive in west London for Wednesday’s Carabao Cup tie against Frank Lampard’s side on the back of a difficult few decades for the club. After bouncing between the second, third and fourth tiers, Grimsby were relegated to the National League in 2010, only regaining Football League status six years later.

Chelsea, meanwhile, would suffer one more relegation, in 1988, before immediately returning to the top tier and beginning an upward trajectory which would ultimately lead them to unprecedented success – not to mention wealth – after Roman Abramovich took over the club in 2003.

Jolley, as a Cambridge economics graduate and former corporate bond trader in New York, might have expected to end up living in some gilded corner of west London. Instead, the compulsion to coach which would ultimately take Booth to India has left the 42-year-old dreaming of emulating his predecessor’s 1983 triumph.