You Can't Take Carlisle From the Boy

The opening shot of the 2008 series of Shameless ranks as one of the best comedy moments I've seen on television in 2009. We open inside the deserted Jockey pub. Jamie and Karen (still in love and still running the place well at this point) look at each other in despair. Jamie mumbles his dissatisfaction, 'It's Friday night,' he says. A few seconds later the situation is explained. The regulars have dragged chairs and other furniture outside. They are drinking from cans and bottles. Jamie heads out to address them. 'Okay' he says, 'you can smoke inside.' The crowd gets up and heads inside.

Good joke, and the point? In some circumstances smoking seems to fit so strongly into the proceedings that certain events and situations remain unthinkable without it. For a long time smoking and going to football was a strong combination. 1 July 2009 marked the second anniversary of the smoking ban in football grounds. As a non-smoker I welcomed the ban and don't miss the smoke wafting around me, and my kids, at matches. The one thing that struck me about the ban when it started was how well observed it was. Like others, I thought it would be an impossible task for some to live with the ban.

Now, like graffiti all over the place and random fights breaking out inside grounds, smoking looks like football history. Amazing, when you consider how long and close the relationship between football and fags has been. It lasted for well over a century. Queen Victoria still had many years to go when tobacco companies realised that involvement in football gave them access to many of their most loyal customers.

From this point until well past the Second World War the relationship between football and cigarettes revolved around the notion that a combination of the two made for the perfect relaxation after a hard week at work. In retrospect some of the products of this relationship seem bizarre. Stanley Matthews - a very public non-smoker - still endorsed Craven A smokes with a slogan that ran: "Stanley's smooth ball control matches the smoothness of Craven 'A'".

England striker Nat Lofthouse once commented: "There's nothing better than lying back in the bath and having a good smoke after a game," Manchester United defender Charlie Roberts, bought a tobacco business on retirement and designed the 'Ducrobel' brand of smokes, the name celebrated a classic Manchester United defence of Duckworth, Roberts and Bell.

From the fifties onwards the health dangers of smoking became well enough known to kick such blatant endorsements into touch. But a succession of fashionable footballers saw nothing wrong with posing with cigars, along with their expensive cocktails and fashionable flared trousers. Our own Stan Bowles was frequently snapped partying in such a manner.

If promoting smoking was over by the seventies, promoting yourself via smoking continued for a long time. The Damned United movie rightly records the love some of the seventies Leeds United team had for their smokes. Billy Bremner in particular perfecting a menacing look as he puffed away.

Elsewhere the wayward bad boys were often snapped with a ciggy. One of the better known cases being Scotland striker Willie Johnston, caught out as a drug cheat at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. As he prepared to fly home in disgrace he was pictured hunched over his stylish long cigarette - probably a More's Menthol - at the hotel bar. More recently the smoking habits of Paul Gascoigne, Zinedine Zidane and Fabien Barthez made news, and fuelled internet chatroom activity.

All this, and we haven't discussed the succession of managers who puffed away as they strutted and stressed. Perhaps the most notable being Johan Cruyff. His twenty a day habit, combined with the stress of management was credited as a major cause of the heart trouble that obliged him to have double bypass surgery in 1991.

Cruyff accepted his fate and didn't blame others, Gazza was more vocal in stating that 'health fascists' had instigated a system that obliged all players to eat, drink and train in the same way. But as the evidence of health risk stacked up and the legal cases linked to secondary smoking started to impact on entertainment businesses many football clubs jumped to banning before the final government push forced the issue. By this point tobacco advertising and sponsorship was outlawed and - in any case - the good smoke/good game mentality that welded football and tobacco for decades made no sense anymore.

I know smokers still resent the ban, but now the camaraderie amongst them seems stronger than ever, as they huddle in tiny areas, and the rest of us don't have to sit in the resulting fumes. The Jockey pub and its indoor smokers belong on television, footballers inciting the rest of us to smoke belong in the past.