Making your mark at Wembley is a dream, but to do it twice is something else. The first for Jim McCalliog was in 1967, when he scored the winner, on his debut for Scotland, as they defeated World Cup-holders, England, 3-2.

Then, in 1976, Jim famously contributed to another Wembley-winner, when he threaded the ball into Bobby Stokes’s stride, for the goal that won Southampton the FA Cup.

Jim regards those moments as going “hand-in-hand”, two products of his “great pedigree”. His budding talents had been recognised in 1965, when Sheffield Wednesday paid £37,500 to Chelsea – a record fee for a teenager (see scrapbook section for photo with Tommy Docherty). Although Ted Bates had backed down from bringing Jim to Southampton in 1970, advising the Board that his achilles was a “risk”, Lawrie McMenemy bought him in 1975.

This was the second example, after Peter Osgood, of a trust in players of experience and international calibre – Jim had gone on to win four more caps – for which McMenemy would become renowned.

His purchase was amply justified by his contribution to the 1976 Cup-run alone: two goals in the Third Round replay at Villa Park; a cheeky volley at Bradford in the quarter-final; and that historic pass in the Final.

Yet Jim still talks about his delightful through-ball for Mick Channon, earlier in the Final, from which, he insists, “Micky should have scored.” As McMenemy began to reshape his Cup-winning team into a promotion-side, Jim was an early casualty. He soon moved into player-coaching, making the “mistake” of opting for that role at Lincoln, when he could have become a squad-player at Derby, for Tommy Docherty, previously his manager at Chelsea and Manchester United. But Willie Bell, with whom he had played as a kid at Leeds, was managing Lincoln and Jim was hoping to help Bell substitute some flair for the legacy of their predecessors: Graham Taylor and Ian Branfoot. Bell promptly left, however, for the US, to be succeeded by Colin Murphy, who had no Football League experience. Jim was not impressed – “who better than a player to know the game?” he asks to this day. He left at the end of the season. Naturally outspoken, he gained a reputation, he reckons,

“as a bit of a rebel” –

a product, perhaps, of his early days when he was picked, as a lad from the Gorbals, to play for Scotland schools, a proud achievement that “they” had said could never happen.

After football, he managed several hotels and pubs, until 2011, when he and his wife, Debbie, took on the Langside B & B in Fenwick, Ayrshire. He took an active part in the celebrations for the 40^th anniversary of lifting the Cup, in 2016 taking his place on the upper deck of the original bus for a Radio Solent interview. Five years later, in September 2021, he was back in town to publicise his new autobiography, “Wembley Wins Wembley Woes” (see scrapbook section).