Middlesbrough play Blackburn on Boxing Day, which should bring a sizeable crowd to the Riverside Stadium. But it won't be a day to match Boxing Day 1949, when a crowd of 53,596 watched Boro play Newcastle United: the biggest crowd ever at their old ground, Ayresome Park, in an age when many spectators still wore hats, and all the players on the team sheet were easily pronounceable. Compared with the Riverside, Ayresome was primitive; on the other hand, it had Hardwick and Mannion, Bryan Robson and Gary Pallister, and all the extra passion that came from watching a match from thronged old terraces on a Saturday afternoon at places such as Burnden Park (Bolton), Roker Park (Sunderland), The Den on Cold Blow Lane (Millwall) or even a rough old ground like Darlington's Feethams – their names proclaiming the places they belonged to, not those who put up money to pay for them.

These and some 20 other lost grounds are richly evoked in Chris Arnot's book Fields of Dreams: Grounds that Football Forgot But The Fans Never Will (Step Beach Press). Some are now long buried under car parks and superstores, others still there but abandoned and mouldering. Too many were in some ways unsavoury and unsafe, a consideration that after Hillsborough no one would undervalue. Yet this book brings back to life a time when the game did not seem, as it so often does now, to be all about big money. The pictures alone would be enough to confirm why the word nostalgia incorporates a word meaning pain.