He played for Newcastle United, Arsenal and Stoke City and, at the first of those clubs, became dissatisfied with the way he was treated. He disputed whether the house the club had allocated to him was habitable, he was unhappy with the unsatisfactory secondary job that the club had arranged (as maximum wage rules at the time forbade clubs from paying the market rate) and he also resented their attempts to stop him playing for the England U-23 team.

Eastham therefore refused to extend his contract and requested a transfer. Clubs could at that time retain players’ registrations but refuse to pay them if they requested a move. Players had few rights and a footballer’s contract was often known as a slavery contract. Many of the players were paid less than the fans watching them and many fans would have had greater freedom of movement at work than was available to players. Eastham was unable to leave Newcastle, so he went on strike at the end of the 1959-60 season.

However, in 1960 Newcastle relented and sold him to Arsenal, but in 1963, with the backing of the Professional Footballers’ Association, he brought a case against Newcastle in the High Court over unpaid wages. The case became a trial of the football employment system and the judge severely criticised the rules restricting the freedom of movement.

While Eastham was about to embark on his legal action, Jimmy Hill, then of Fulham FC, led the Professional Footballers’ Association to a notable victory in 1961 over the highly conservative football establishment regarding the maximum wage. Hill railed against the injustice of never earning more than £20 per week despite being part of a hugely profitable entertainment industry and saw the maximum-wage rule as tyranny.

George Eastham and Jimmy Hill were players who I remember not only as talented inside-forwards but as hugely brave and influential in opposing the established order and laying the foundations for the modern game. You may perhaps think the game has now gone too far in the opposite direction, but today’s exorbitantly paid top footballers, with their agents and their fast cars, have a lot to thank them both for. Hill died just before Christmas 2015 and now Eastham has gone. I was still at school in the early sixties but I well remember what a pivotal time for football those years were.

Old-fashioned folk like me still enjoy reading a hard copy national newspaper. The chap who delivers my paper tells me that he has no customers under the age of fifty and I expect newspapers will eventually disappear into cyberspace like the Independent already has. I always start at the back and my wife often has to put up with me spluttering into my toast and coffee as I am confronted by yet another double-page spread about Arsenal or Manchester United, or journalistic handwringing over the grinding to a halt of Manchester City’s efforts to buy every trophy.

This worship of big money clubs has been going on for years and one very significant reason why Villa have missed out is the succession of second-rate owners we’ve been saddled with during the Premier League. You would think that we might start getting more attention from the press now that we at last have competent owners who have appointed a talented manager and the team is deservedly featuring in the upper reaches of the table. I am still finding, though, that I generally need to look for any Villa news in the bottom corner of one of the sports pages. Even then I don’t have high hopes of finding anything.

A possible reason for this, apart from the fact that we haven’t yet attained a big enough turnover to attract the attention of our craven media, is that the club seems to me not to be very good at promoting itself. Unai may be one of the finest managers in the club’s history, but English isn’t his first language and he seems to have attended media relations courses where he has been trained to avoid saying anything too controversial.

Yes, as Unai says, of course we want to be consistent and to keep improving, but I think we might get noticed more if we had people who are more media-friendly getting a bigger share of the spotlight. Ollie Watkins, for instance, has sometimes seemed this season as though he might be the man the media want to interview. When we are European champions again, we will get the attention we deserve, but, in the meantime, I wonder if the club couldn’t perhaps do a bit better in this department. It will make my breakfast reading more enjoyable if we do.

And then there were three. The sackings of Steve Cooper, Gary O’Neil and Russell Martin and their replacement by the Dutchman Ruud van Nistelrooy, the Portuguese Vitor Pereira and the Croatian Ivan Juric respectively mean that Eddie Howe, Sean Dyche and Kieran McKenna are now the only British managers (or coaches) left in England’s showpiece football league. Even the FA has plumped for a German, Thomas Tuchel, to take charge of the England team following Gareth Southgate and Lee Carsley.

I wonder how we have managed to reach this situation. In the early Premier League years, the successful clubs mostly brought in overseas coaches, Arsene Wenger at Arsenal for example, while Chelsea employed a succession of coaches from abroad. Alex Ferguson was the outstanding exception to the trend. I could at that time see a reason for owners looking overseas. English football had been insular for too many years and, in my view, dominated by an emphasis on physical strength and stamina.

After thirty years or more of the Premier League, though, I would have expected there to be more competition from a new breed of younger British managers for places in our own prestige competition. Many of our Premier League clubs are now foreign owned and prone to casting the net a lot wider than they used to, but even so, I find the present situation remarkable. There are plenty of coaching courses to be found here, but perhaps they need to be beefed up to try to produce the elite British coaches who are at present so few and far between. Meanwhile I think the lack of home-grown managerial talent in our own showpiece football competition is something of a national embarrassment.

Did you really believe at the start of the season that Villa would be fifth in the Champions’ League with thirteen points after six matches? I certainly didn’t, despite knowing that our manager has an outstanding record in European competitions. After all, we are Villa and success has been something we have only dreamed about for decades. What is more, our recent away form in the Premier League has been a complete contrast; in five matches since the beginning of November we have scored two goals while conceding fourteen and we have lost all five games.

We have now reached a crunch point in the league phase, with our results against Monaco away and Celtic at home in late January crucial if we are to finish in the top eight and qualify automatically for the knockout phase. One more win would take us to sixteen points, which is likely to be enough, but seventeen or more would make sure. I just hope that our defeat in Bruges doesn’t turn out too costly.

Hopefully we can put our run of poor Premier League away results behind us. Fifteen points (or two draws) will make us doubtful for the top eight and thirteen or fourteen will mean we can look forward to two play-off matches in February, which we don’t need as the squad has more than enough football scheduled already. However, if we are in the play-offs, the teams finishing from ninth to sixteenth will have the advantage of playing the second leg at home.

An interesting feature of the league this year is the number of so-called big clubs who are struggling, while Villa, along with the equally unfashionable French clubs Brest and Lille, are riding high, also with thirteen points. The Opta predicted final table shows Villa finishing seventh, but it is all very close.