When Alan Smith stepped back into the Alvechurch clubhouse at Lye Meadow he gave in to the nostalgia.
'Exactly the same, like time forgot the place,' he tells Sportsmail of his return to the Worcestershire village club where he took the first steps in a senior career that would lead him to the very top of the game with Arsenal and England.
As a patron of the club, Smith had been back there before. This time, he took his wife, Penny, to the place where they first met in 1981, when he was a teenage centre forward, scoring goals while studying modern languages at Coventry Polytechnic and she was daughter of the Alvechurch vice-chairman, Allan Schofield.