Although Doug McGibbon spent most of his playing career on Southampton’s books, the official records credit him with only 16 games and 11 goals for the club.  But those bald statistics omit his 49 war-time appearances, in the course of which he scored 32 times. Add these in and his goals-per-game ratio of 0.6 approaches that achieved for the Saints by his father, Charlie McGibbon.

That said, Doug’s main claims to fame with Southampton rest upon two matches, played within just over four weeks of each other, in the middle of the transitional 1945-46 season, during which the club was still engaged in “unofficial” matches in the War League South, while playing two-legged ties in the FA Cup that had resumed for real.The story of those two games, as recalled by Doug, has been told in some detail in Ted Bates’s biography. Suffice it, here, to convey the gist. On 29 December 1945, aircraft-engineer McGibbon set out for The Dell, on his Rudge Whitworth motorbike, from RAF Shillingford in Oxfordshire.

Floods on the A34 brought him off, but he persevered, stopped at his in-laws in Bursledon, where he discovered that he’d missed a lift from his father-in-law, and, after accepting a spoonful of rice pudding from his wife, arrived at the ground, never having “felt less like playing football in my life.” Yet he not only scored six times in the Saints’ 7-0 demolition of Chelsea, but achieved a record when a ploy invented by Ted Bates and Stan Cutting, worked to perfection. Kicking-off for the second half, Doug tapped the ball to Bates, who swung it wide to Bill Stroud, who had prematurely “infiltrated”, by his own admission, into Chelsea’s half. Bill crossed diagonally and McGibbon, who’d kept running, scored with what he called a “mud-cutter” – timed at only 4.6 seconds from the kick-off.

Then, on 30 January 1946, Southampton were away to Queens Park Rangers in the second leg of a Fourth Round FA Cup-tie. He accepted a dodgy lift and never made it. His absence fooled two BBC trialists in the commentary box. One of them, Brian Johnston, confessed in his memoirs to giving “the full treatment” to McGibbon, not realising it was not him. That came back to embarrass Johnston in 1984, when he was the subject of This is Your Life and Doug was invited by Thames TV to tell the tale.

When League football resumed in September 1946, McGibbon was the first- choice centre-forward. But after scoring nine times in 12 games, he was mysteriously transferred to Fulham for £4,250. 

The fans were not amused, the post bag of the Football Echo overflowed.

Having started with a hat-trick for them, he soon left for Bournemouth, where his League strike-rate was 65 in 103. Next stop Lovells Athletic in the Southern League, where his career ended when he hit the bar – with his head. So back to aircraft engineering – in Hamble – and managing the Air Service Training team, for which he’d played as a teenager. Having moved to Bucks, via Middlesex, Doug died in the Aylesbury care home, where he had spent his final years telling football yarns – like the one about the motor-cyclist who turned up, soaking wet and under-nourished, to score six goals, one of them in record time.