Title pages: John Lukic at the League Cup Final, 1988

I feel like I've been threatening this for a while, and threatening myself with it, and now that time has presented the opportunity I'm making the threat real. Sitting down to pay eager attention to the 1988 League Cup final, ready to write about it.

It was actually the Littlewoods Challenge Cup final, to give its full title, played in bright sunshine at Wembley at the end of April. There's a military band on the pitch to play the national anthem, and to rattle out some snare retorts while Brian Moore tries to introduce the game on ITV. All in pink, Littlewoods' representative Lady Barnchester shakes hands with the teams: holders Arsenal, challengers Luton Town.

Of all the games, eh? But I have my reasons. They're found in the front pages of a book I have, The Hamlyn Encyclopedia of Soccer by Ian Morrison, published in 1989. I think it's the first football book I ever had, a large format hardback priced £9.95 with, alas, a photo of Bryan Robson on the front. He wrote the foreword; mercifully, he's wearing an England kit.

The contents are an odd miscellany. In an endnote the author describes the difficulties of distilling the world game into one easy-reading book; even with an Anglocentric stance, he's had to make tough selections, so the only English clubs featured individually are First Division title winners. And yet he finds space for the Debenhams Cup, played for over two legs between the two teams from the Third and Fourth Divisions that went furthest in the FA Cup; the one and only time it was played, in 1977, Chester beat Port Vale. It's on the same page as crossbar, Cruyff and Dalglish, and presumably as important. There are entries for shinpads and throw-ins but not for fouls or free-kicks. I learned a lot, but not all of it was useful.

But photographs dominate, and with my eyes closed I can still picture some of the most beautiful. And one of Russell Osman, miscaptioned as Matt Le Tissier, that confused me greatly at the time. The cover has an inset photo of Diego Maradona from the side, about to strike an Adidas Tango, his bodyshape a perfect description of technique. There's one shot of Ruud Gullit in motion on the back and another inside. George Best is shown with Paul Reaney, Norman Hunter and John Giles crowding him, Hunter about to intercept.

The main photo on Leeds United's page is of Kevin Keegan playing for Newcastle, something else that used to bother me; the Leeds photo is on the page before, and it's of Jackie Charlton's opening goal against Chelsea in the 1970 FA Cup final. It's not a good shot: the only clear sight of a Leeds player is of Allan Clarke's back, while Chelsea players stand around in despair. There's better on the Wales page, where John Charles is heading for goal with his face calm and his eyes on the heavy leather ball, while a Scotland player flails and panics under his jump; the Scotland page has a photo of Gordon Strachan scrapping in a tackle against England, and a caption describing him as a 'stalwart', one of those words football fans come to before anybody else.

And on the title pages, spread across two, is an enormous photo of Luton's Brian Stein scoring against Arsenal in the 1988 League Cup final. He's running away to celebrate but the ball hasn't quite hit the net; the shutter of a camera in the bottom corner has captured the blur of the Mitre Delta size five about to smack the lens. Between the ball and Stein, lying on the grass with his right arm stretched out flat, already looking to see where the shot that has beaten him came from, in a pose I became familiar with in the mid-nineties, is the Arsenal goalkeeper John Lukic. Soon I knew him as Leeds United's goalkeeper, and would look at the mullet back of his thick brown bowlcut in this photo, and wonder about it.