sport news IAN HERBERT: It's Impossible not to smile at Saint & Greavsie's TV gold trends now

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The joke was not the most nuanced. A hapless Jimmy Greaves, driving his Ford Granada to Watford’s training ground, is put through the team’s fitness regime by Graham Taylor and fails the test so spectacularly, he has to be told he will not be starting instead of Mo Johnston against Everton in the 1984 FA Cup final.

But it is one of the many scenes from the legendary Saint and Greavsie FA Cup final shows which, watched back now, leave you smiling involuntarily.

There’s the way a slightly cardboard Taylor enthusiastically embraces his role in the scene, demonstrating to Greaves how he expects press-ups and a jumping exercise to be done. 

‘You have got to get your legs over that bar,’ he tells him. There’s Greaves, red-faced with effort, failing to execute a forward roll. And there’s the obvious delight the players take in being a part of this.

The visit of Ian St John and Greaves to the training ground of the two participants became part of the fixtures of fittings of FA Cup final day when their show was at its peak in the 1980s and a compilation of the best bits, to be screened on the morning of today’s final, transports us back to those times.