DO you remember what happened to the last Town man to score a hat-trick? He plays for Tottenham and England now.

While it seems unlikely that Ben Gladwin’s ascent will be quite so vertical, Tuesday was certainly a big step up for a lad who was still playing for Marlow Town when Ryan Mason scored three in 2013.

However, the strangest part of Gladwin’s story isn’t his rise, it’s his early stumble. To watch him now it seems bizarre that Reading ever let him go for being ‘too small’.

Clearly Gladwin wasn’t born 6ft 2in but to watch him glide past defenders like a tiger on Vaselined paws you wonder just how much talent is needed to smash through the glass ceiling of height.

His story is common enough in football, though. Charlie Austin suffered the same fate, at the same club. Plenty of others have too, including Peterborough’s Erhun Oztumer, who looked almost as gifted as Gladwin on Saturday and scored 60 goals in two seasons for Dulwich Hamlet, but at 5ft 3in seems to be considered too short.

The attraction of tall players for any manager is easy to see – they literally stand out. It is the first thing you spot when a visiting side line up at the County Ground – which ones tower over Town’s relatively small team. The expectation that a taller player has been chosen for his size, not his ability can be seen in the backhanded compliment, ‘good touch, for a big man’.

But height isn’t always an advantage. Research shows that tall players are more likely to have fouls given against them – perhaps as happened to Gladwin with the penalty on Tuesday.

Also smaller players’ stride, or ‘stepping pattern’ as the scientists call them, do help with changes of direction and close control. But Gladwin seems to be equipped not only with the delicate feet of smaller player in the frame of a much larger one but also the drive of a man who has tasted rejection, and didn’t like it. And that is why he could yet make a big step up.