Alan Dee: Kit colour clashes should be booted out right now

But one thing we could certainly agree on, and that’s his famous reply when pestered to provide more colour choice to customers who were queueing up for his famous Model T motors.

You can have any colour you like as long as it’s black, he said, or words to that effect – not because he was opposed to anything else, but because he was determined to keep the assembly line as simple as possible.

But I’m with him, especially in one particular aspect of modern life – and that’s football boots.

When I was a young shaver keen to express my funky personality and show I was very much an individual, I persuaded my sainted mother to spring for a pair of boots promoted, if memory serves, by carrot-topped World Cup winner Alan Ball. At a time when such things were regarded as dangerously decadent, they were white.

We all know that kids will round with relish on anyone who steps outside the norm, and it’s fair to say that I quickly learned to regret my rashness.

With everyone else in the side still shod in sober black, I stood out like a sore thumb and they didn’t let me forget it.

And as that was a time when you could only successfully claim the need for new boots if the old ones had fallen apart, I repented at leisure as well.

But despite those childhood scars, I’m not advocating turning the clock back and introducing a ban on boots of many colours. I can move with the times.

But in the more modern spirit of metrosexual mores, when men moisturise and fret about their designer undertrousers, at least we could try and make sure that they match?

Now that coloured boots are so commonplace as to raise nary an eyebrow, more and more garish options are coming to the market.

And coupled with the current fondness for kits that dip into the dayglo paintbox in an attempt to make an impression, we now have footballers – whether they be highly-honed professional athletes or Sunday morning scuffers – who look like they’ve been sent out to do battle after a quick session with the dressing-up box and the Dulux colour chart.

It’s wrong that a team picture, viewed from the ankle down, looks like a tube of Refreshers. Come on, football authorities – boots should be one colour per team, and that colour should match the kit. You never know, there might be some money in it...