As Mark Walters sits in Aston Villa’s players’ lounge, he looks around and says he simply does not recognise the place. With its swanky upholstery, plush mahogany bar and the 3D action pictures on the wall, it is nothing like the basic, uninspiring room of his day.

He is here to talk about his new autobiography Wingin’ It, covering his time with clubs such as Villa, Rangers and Liverpool, a career which spanned more than 650 games across 21 years. It is a tale full of eye-opening moments, from his fraught relationship with his bigamist father, to playing for a junior team under the auspices of a notorious paedophile coach.

But he smiles that when it comes to the football passages, much of it must read like a historical document, memories from another era altogether. Almost everything, he says, has changed since he made his debut at Villa Park in 1981.

For a start, in this era of carefully calibrated eating plans, he recalls that the only dietary advice he received as a young player was, to say the least, rudimentary.

“I remember Peter Withe telling me always to eat brown bread. ‘Much healthier than white bread’, he said. That was about the extent of sports science in them days.”