When Shorts Were Short concerns itself solely with what was actually a very narrow window in football history when teams wore, well, short shorts. The podcast takes 1954 as its starting point, when Umbro made their first England kit with shorter shorts, to 1992, when short shorts were all but finished as Umbro's baggy shorts for Tottenham's new kit, ahead of the '91 FA Cup Final, quickly caught on.

If the shorts weren't short, we don't talk about it.

On the 14th of June 1982, a day after the 1982 World Cup kicked off in Spain, Argentine forces surrendered and the British flag was raised on West Falkland to signal the end of the conflict, news if I remember rightly that broke either just before Brazil and the Soviet Union took to the field or during the game itself. Either way, for anyone watching that game, I don’t think too many minds were on the Falklands because we were watching something extraordinary unfold. And up on the Yorkshire coast, in Scarborough, a small boy was watching the match too, and while up and down the country, boys spent the rest of the summer pretending to be Zico, Eder, Socrates and co, for this boy it went a little deeper.

That game against the Soviets left him bewitched by the men in yellow and Telê Santana’s men would continue to thrill, their fragility at the back increasingly evident along the way. A complicated format involving a second group stage shouldn’t have been too difficult to navigate, but instead Brazil would find themselves in arguably the Group of Death to top all Group of Deaths. The semi-finals would elude them, perhaps adding to the myth that had quickly built up around that team and Brazil ’82 would go the same way as Hungary ’54 and the Netherlands 20 years later, forever doomed to be labelled as one of, if not the greatest, side to never win the World Cup.

And for that young boy in Scarborough, the memory of the summer of ’82 would never leave him.

Follow Stuart on Twitter @loxleymisty44

And find Stuart's book here 1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure

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