Football memorabilia? Don't let them take the shirt off your back

An anonymous telephone bidder has paid £157,750 for the shirt Pele wore on the day Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico City in 1970. Rik Pike, a spokesman for Christie's saleroom in London, said the figure "surpassed our wildest dreams".

I bet it did. Before the sale last week, the shirt's authenticity was being seriously questioned in Brazil. But Pike insisted Christie's were "100% certain it is the shirt Pele finished the game in", that the saleroom's own "football expert" had compared grass stains with contemporary photographs, and that video footage showed the Italian player Roberto Rosato, who had offered the shirt for auction, "at the final whistle running half the length of the field to swap his shirt" with the great man.

Not on my video he doesn't. Nor in my own recall of that resplendent June day which remains, 32 years on, one of the most stirring in my memory. And vivid - it seems as if it was only last Wednesday week that the referee's final whistle cued thousands at once to spill over the touchline moats and festively mob the Brazilian players. Rosato must have covered his 60 yards in three seconds to get to Pele and for them to swap shirts.

In his 1977 autobiography Pele writes: "The second the final whistle blew, crowds poured from the stands like hungry wolves. I was without clothes in seconds, except for a small pair of underpants. Shirt, shorts, socks and shoes were gone in an instant."

In the Daily Mirror, Ken Jones confirmed next morning: "At once wave upon wave of Brazilian supporters broke out over the players, their shirts torn from their backs, stockings from their legs, boots from their feet." My own still enduring image is of the joyful Pele, dressed only in his underpants and a sombrero, being chaired through the teeming, triumphant throng all around the ground.

It may well be, of course, that the treasured canary shirt previously owned by Signor Rosato that went for those oodles of boodle at Christie's last week was the brand new one that, half an hour after the pitch had been cleared, Pele says he changed into in the dressing room prior to the medal ceremony. Not quite the same thing, not at £157,000. Anyway, if that was the case, why the grass stains?

The sporting memorabilia market makes the genuine collector extremely wary. Remember the Stoke saleroom two years ago trying to get away with "lot 392, a boot possibly worn by Sir Stanley Matthews in the 1953 FA Cup final" or, at another auction, a fortune being paid for the short-sleeved shirt Brian Lara wore to score his Test-record 375 in Antigua?

Think of the look on the face of the proud guy who got it home, put it on his wall in its glass case alongside a picture of Lara's famous shot that broke the record - and, in it, saw that the batsman was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs rolled up.

In the past 12 months, two other "priceless" cricket artefacts have gone under the hammer for exorbitant sums - the ball with which Bob Willis (15.1-3-43-8) sensationally won the 1981 Headingley Test, and the one with which Fred Trueman took his then-world-record 300th Test wicket - only for immediate and very compelling doubts to be raised about either being the genuine article. In this latest case, had Christie's inquired of Pele himself about his 1970 shirt's authenticity?

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