Hugh MacDonald on Saturday: Once there was a magazine that spoke to the youth of the West of Scotland. It was called Shoot! And it is no more.

In Glasgow, a magazine is something one puts in one's machine-gun. Elsewhere it has a different connotation and can even be taken to describe a selection of articles contained innewsprint. Glasgow calls this a fish supper.

But once there was a magazine that spoke to the youth of the West of Scotland. It was called Shoot! And it is no more. It merely will exist in the cyberspace of that Interweb thingy. The magazine now sleeps with the Mark Fishs.

I have not been so crushed since the sports editor mistook me for his Wimbledon cushion. The news has left me high and dry when Iam, of course, normally low and wet. Shoot! was the weekly update on English football. For those of us old enough to remember an England side winning the World Cup (it did happen, though it is rarely mentioned now) Shoot! was our guide to all things south of the border.

It was a football magazine of exotic layout but simple language. It sometimes strayed into Scottish football where it was as superficial as a Big Brother contestant on the principles of Heidegger. But its coverage of England was superb.

Where else could one read what the top footballers ate? Where else could one discover what the top footballers watched? Nowadays the stars eat pasta and watch lap dancers. Then everyone took a pre-match meal of steak and chips with double egg and watched Starsky and Hutch while dreaming of a date with Sophia Loren.

It was an innocent time. Footballers had ambitions of owning a nice pub or maybe coaching the reserves. They spoke about the great banter in the dressing room. This owed little to the satirical wit of Monty Python. It tended to involve the application of Deep Heat to intimate areas.

Iremember Shoot! had wonderful columnists. They could witter on for 800 words and reveal nothing. This, of course, could never happen today. Their revelations concerned how the boys were all up for it, the next match was going to be tough and that the season would unfold one match at a time. But don't tell the missus, heh, heh. There was Alan Ball, who had to be read in a high-pitched voice for the best effect. There were others who have passed into the close season of time.

They were all marked with a cheeky chappie attitude and splendid hair styles. There was the perm. Its effect on the male have been much under-estimated. There are chaps of my generation who look back and say: "Why did I have to do that? Could I not just have had erectile dysfunction instead?"

Others adopted for the hairstyle that resembled a wannabe for Herman's Hermits. The Hermits retreated to the cave of anonymity in the mid-sixties. Their hairstyles survived well into the 1970s thanks to a succession of footballers who found retro hairdressers conveniently close to the bookies and the Red Lion. It was a time when everybody drank lager. Including the Archbishop of Canterbury. Especially the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Football was fun. Footballers were funny. The only agents were the chaps who came round your house on a Friday evening and collected the pools money. The English first division (and then, confusingly, it was the first division) was full of teams that assumed roles.

Liverpool were briskly efficient. Chelsea were a pub team that, when dragged from the bar, could win the FA Cup and the European Cup-Winners' Cup. Nottingham Forest were neat, precise and managed by Brian Clough who was mad and a genius. Leeds United were the villains. They kicked with the force of a mule threatened with castration. They were also capable of wonderful football, but that is forgotten.

And so will Shoot! But not by me. There are occasions when I cannot remember where I left my car keys, where I live and how I spell my second name. But part of me retains a memory of a shiny magazine that reflected a cheerful image of the biggest game in town. We all know that English football had a destructive boozing tendency then. There was also a culture of dressing-room bullying. There were allegations of match-fixing and biased refs.

But Shoot!, quite properly, concentrated on the important stuff. It was all about the hair, the cars, the girlfriend and the steak and chips. It was about innocence. And that never survives in a magazine or in a supporter.