THE transfer was to create football history and eclipse the British record fee, but the subject of everyone’s attention knew little about it. Jackie Sewell’s prodigious goalscoring feats with Notts County, in tandem with Tommy Lawton, the legendary England centre forward, had persuaded Sheffield Wednesday, who were in the top flight at the time, to part with £34,500 for the second division player.

Early one Thursday morning, in March 1951, Sewell was told to report to the Victoria Station Hotel, where he sat in a small ante-room while directors haggled over his valuation. Twelve hours later, deprived of food and watered infrequently, he emerged into the night air of Nottingham as the most expensive player in the country. He realised his worth the next day only when his landlady, a County fan, broke down in tears at breakfast as she read of his departure in the newspapers.

More than half a century on from those draconian measures, treating players like mushrooms is no longer the acceptable face of sport, although when a transfer saga such as that of Michael Essien unfolds so laboriously, there is a fervent yearning for nostalgia and a natural order of sorts to be restored.

An end appears mercifully in sight for the deal after Chelsea offered Lyons £25 million for the Ghana midfield player, although the West London club await official confirmation of its acceptance. None of which has prevented Essien from expounding in gushing terms in expectation of leaving the French champions to join the Barclays Premiership title holders.

“I am so relieved, I feel so well now, I am very happy, it’s great,” he said. “I really like the English Premier League. I wanted to play in it and Chelsea have become one of the greatest clubs in Europe.”

While Jean-Michel Aulas, the Lyons chairman, has been instrumental in delaying the deal, the nature of the move has once more confirmed why the laboured cliché “it is a marathon, not a sprint” applies not only to the strategy of winning league championships.

The attempts by the Anelka family to extricate Nicolas from his Arsenal contract and on to a plane to Real Madrid during the summer of 1999 epitomised the modern transfer tedium. After months of threats and denials, Anelka eventually kicked a ball for the Spanish club, but not before the Frenchman had laid the blame for the fiasco at just about everyone’s door except his own.

In August 1999, Esteban Fuertes, an Argentinian forward, arrived at Pride Park as a Derby County player after an on-off affair that gripped only the lonely and bored in the East Midlands. Like many South American footballers, Fuertes was owned by several consortiums, agents and clubs, who all wanted their percentage of the £3 million fee once the piece of prime Argentine beef had been divided up. Derby need not have bothered; a dodgy passport precluded him from re-entering Britain after a training camp in Portugal two months later and he was never seen again in a Derby shirt.