Remember when Del Boy, Rodney and Uncle Albert hit the jackpot and swapped Nelson Mandela House for luxurious new surroundings?

Recall how it wasn’t long before they all gravitated back towards their old flat, yearning for what they had and the life they’d left behind?

Me, too. And I bet you a lot of West Ham fans will be remembering it, too, over the next year or two.

Now, I’m no lover of the Irons but I must admit even I was a bit choked up as the Boleyn Ground hosted its final game this week.

I’ve spent a lot of time at that place – watching Tottenham more often than not – but I’ve got mates who are Hammers fans and many times I’ve had to sup incognito drinks in home pubs, hoping beyond hope that my true colours would remain undetected.

My memories of the place are all either really good or very bad, no middle ground down Green Street, it’s a place of extremes, you see, and football is going to be poorer without it.

I’m not going to go into the merits or otherwise of the Olympic Stadium, I’m not even going to touch on the Man United coach controversy (the bottling of a bus, not the non-sacking of a Dutchman).

No this is about the loss of another part of the footballing fabric of this country. That fabric is beginning to look more tattered by the year.

Upton Park and the surrounding area is not the nicest. The ground is not the loudest. The people are not the nicest, or indeed nastiest, I’ve come across in 25 years of fandom.

What the place is – was – is unique. It had character and a quirky sort of charm.

In the next couple of years, we’re going to lose more iconic old grounds in the form of Stamford Bridge and, though I’ve not quite got my head round it yet, White Hart Lane.

In 10 years’ time, football will be unrecognisable from what it was as recently as 20 years ago. We’ll all use spotless mass transit to drop us within yards of shiny glass and chrome cathedrals of architecture.

The food will be Michelin starred (and priced to match) and 50, 60, 70,000 people – half of them visitors from overseas – will sit nicely, leaf through their programmes, check their song-sheets and wait for something entertaining to happen.

West Ham might be swapping their old flat for a shiny new council house but I doubt the soul of the club will make the move with them.

You’d be hard pressed to find a club whose roots are more tied to its community than the Hammers.

I’m glad for my mates that these fans got to see a final game worthy of the occasion.

o0o

Big week for Roy Hodgson. In my view, Euro squads should be decided on form, recent form, not historical form in an England shirt over the past three years.

This should be the easiest squad he ever gets to pick. Chuck a load of Spurs, Leicester and Liverpool players in and give Jack Wheelchair a summer off to rebuild his fragile body.

However, I join the nation in waiting with bated breath to see how much of a hash he makes of it.