MISSED a match once because of a tight calf. He was an Aberdeen Angus so obviously would not pay me in.

But in my playing days I could be relied upon to take the field. After that I could be relied upon to make such a fool of myself I was urged to wear a red nose and size 22 boots and come to games in a car whose doors fell off. Of course, I was doing that already.

But I rarely succumbed to injury. I missed pulling on a jersey because of the pressures of work, the demands of family and the difficulty of leaving a locked cell. The last only on three occasions. But I never was injured. Or if I was injured, I played on. I was not brave. Just daft and adhering to the old amateur fitba code that if Stephen Hawking had turned up he would have been told to play out on the wing and see if he could run it off.

In the old days we only wore bandages if our tattoos were fresh and leaking. Nowadays there is a plethora of bandages, insteps and kinesiology tapes. In my day, Kinesiology Tape was a porn star. Our only protection was the blessed shinpad.

This humble fitba’ accessory is the subject of the column principally because a mention of it the other week caused a flurry among The Herald readership. Normally, this column is only read by John, the resident psychiatrist, as a matter of professional duty. He has averted many an emotional crisis by noting my frenetic use of Mouldmaster and upped by medication immediately.

But apparently, in the manner of a leaking nappie, my outpourings seeped into the wider world. Shinpads were the only reason. They provoked as much comment as an article on The Herald website suggesting that studies had found the SNP were responsible for the Great Fire of London with inquiries still not ruling out a nationalist involvement in the outbreak of the bubonic plague.

But back to shinpads. For men of a certain age they were a rite of passage. One’s first pair of shinpads was the announcement that one had reached what amounts to manhood in Scotland of the sixties. The Spartans would lay their newborn babies on rocks overnight, the Masai would circumcise their teenagers without anaesthetic. In Possil we would do both before we had our tea but we would also acquire a pair of shinpads as a testament to growing up.

This gift was a prelude to playing the first proper match. It came just before one pulled on one’s first real, fitba’ jersey. Weans now get them at birth. We had to wait until the jannie handed one over the shirt in some dingy block of bricks in the outskirts of Glasgow before we ventured out to face the might of Thornliebank primary.

Most lads looked at the shinpads with the same incomprehension as an Amazonian tribe offers an overflying Jumbo jet. Our times of playing in the street and in the park had offered the lesson that football was physical and sore. But we did not know we could take measures to diminish the possibility of hurt. Shinpads were viewed as affectation and, frankly, they became increasingly so as careers edged into amateur football. If shinpads were to offer any protection, they should have been applied to our foreheads to avoid the concussion caused by the application of a centre-half’s napper. A mattress, though, would not have lessened that pain.

But, still, the shinpads were donned. In terms of naivety, this application of a piece of plastic to our legs was akin to a First World soldier believing he would escape the depredations of a charge over no man’s land if only he pulled his socks up.

Some players were pernickety about shinpad wearing. They would tape them carefully so that they would not slip and slide. Others would have several pairs that they would change according to conditions. I never understood any of this. I had to be persuaded to wear them and they usually fell out. And I did not go looking for them. I picked them up at the end of the game from a puddle or plucked from the sharpened studs of the opposition stopper. We always shared a look. It was cheaper than each of us paying for one.

The glance conveyed the truth that any notion that a shinpad could save one was contemptible nonsense. It would be akin to suffering from scurvy and expecting to be cured by a Lemsip.

The only possible use of a shinpad was as an early warning system. If one heard one crack, then the race was on to find the nearest telephone box to call for an ambulance. A split shinpad normally announced a broken leg. It did not prevent one.

But at least those with a broken leg had a decent excuse to miss at least one match. Nowadays they call off with the most weak of excuses. Tight calf? It would need more than that to prevent one from going into battle, sorry, play on a Saturday. Tight calf? We would have devoured a herd, shinpads and all.