THIS WEEK, in a nod to Euro 2004, Object Lesson visits the National Football Museum in Preston. There you can track the sport’s full pig’s-bladder-to-golden-balls history, taking in a Chinese ceremony called Kemari and a more violent version in Renaissance Italy called calcio along the way. Watch out for the display on Nettie Honeyball, the redoubtable Victorian who established the first British ladies’ club, and marvel at the penury of the first football stars.
But the object that will excite most emotion is a tatty old bit of material. Not the BBC commentator John Motson’s famous sheepskin (though that is there as well), but a haunting reminder of one of England’s most outrageous defeats. In the quarter-final tie of England v Argentina in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City, one of the world’s greatest footballers, Diego Maradona produced his “hand of God”, an audacious punch of the ball into the back of the net, unnoticed by the linesmen or referee.
At the end of the match it was the England midfielder Steve Hodge who ended up with Maradona’s shirt — flung at him in the players’ tunnel by the elated Argentinian — and for the next few years this blue nylon kit provided some garden sportswear for Hodge’s young children. Perhaps it deserved no better: the shirt itself is badly made, the badge is only half sewn on and the number 10 looks as if it was cut out with scissors.
Tatty it may be, but 15 years after the match the shirt was worth more than £100,000. Thanks to Hodge it is now on public display.