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Caroline Bailey was dancing in the streets of East Anglia in May and hasn't given up hopes of a repeat performance

Picture a golden evening in May. Fifty thousand peo­ple, drunk on unaccustomed success, are clinging precariously to phone boxes and lamp posts as an open-top bus, its passengers playing pass-the-parcel with the First Division trophy, inches into view. With Premiership football to look forward to for the first time in almost a decade, it’s easy to believe, as grown men weep openly around you, that this is just the beginning.

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Lincoln City boss Graham Taylor announced his arrival on the managerial scene as his side's outstanding home record gave them the Division Four title, Roger Titford recalls

The long-term significance
This was the season that launched Graham Taylor’s career. Look at those Lincoln City stats – 71 home goals (an average of more than three a game!), 111 in all and 74 points (equivalent to 106 with three points for a win). Among the stars of the side were John Ward and Percy Freeman up front; Ian Branfoot and Sam Ellis at the back. Two years later Taylor nearly repeated the feat with Fourth Division Watford. Sadly, international football was another matter.

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Smart-casual wear and laid-back pallyness proliferated on both channels during Euro 2004, even if expert analysis did not. But, says Cameron Carter, the pundits' humour was no worse than Skinner and Baddiel's

 I t started tensely and just got worse. Before the Portugal v Greece game many of us were troubled by Dull Host Anxiety – you may yourself have experienced this on hearing the voice of Norah Jones wafting earward as you pull off your mittens outside the neighbours’ door. I sat there on day one fearing that in the opening ceremony Portugal would be reduced to a demonstration of the port bottling process by a giant Eusébio doll, aided by Lisbon schoolchildren holding dining-table-shaped balloons. So it was with some relief that I learned Portugal had in fact discovered the world and taught it how to exist. To add colour to the nautical scene, several hundred citizens dressed as orange sperm arranged themselves into a representation of a giant football, a spectacle only partly diminished by a shot of two of the sperm clearly chatting about their costumes on their miraculous journey to the ball-womb.

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In the first of a series of articles looking at how the tournament was received at home, Al Needham strokes his chin, sifts through the discarded plastic flagpoles and wonders where all those crosses of St George came from. And does it mean anything anyway?

It’s good for a country and its people to take stock and re-evaluate its sense of identity every now and then, and I did just that in a bus shelter last month, sitting next to an elderly Jamaican woman, watching the endless procession of cars with plastic white flags with red crosses clipped to their windows. Where had they come from? It wasn’t this bad in 2002. Had a giant sandcastle firm been made bankrupt, or something? Was it just a local thing? And what did it all mean? “Look at these fools,” said the Jamaican woman, all of a sudden. “They don’t know what it means to be patriotic. In Jamaica, we have the flag up all year round, not for some… pussyclaat football game.” Then she sucked her teeth. For a very long time.

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After failing to play his way out of Scottish Division Two, the midfielder looked set for the scrap heap in 2002. But as Neil Forsyth writes, he found an unlikely second wind

Generally speaking, football careers tend to arc in achievement. For some the peak comes achingly early: think Norman Whiteside, Lee Sharpe or Peter Marinello. More fortunate are those who delay the dip until late in their career, leaving earlier achievement undiluted. Kenny Dalglish, Alan Shearer and the  1997-98 Arsenal back four ease into this category.

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