Back in the day when a manager might drive to fetch a potential signing, Ted Bates could be relied upon to impress the player with his knowledge of him, while terrifying him with his driving.  Bates’s signing of Jimmy Melia from Wolves in 1964 is a case in point.

“All the way down in the car,” Jimmy explained to Bates’s biographer, Ted “was so nice, so enthusiastic, so full of soccer. He knew everything about me. I couldn’t believe it.” The knowledge went deep: “how many games I’d played, how many goals I’d scored, when I first started with Liverpool – schoolboys. Everything! He kept chatting away and – gosh! – I’ve been with a few bad drivers in my life, but he must be the worst.”

A deep-lying, scheming inside-forward at his home-town Liverpool, Jimmy was twice capped in 1963. Yet nine months later, he was sold to Wolves – a First Division side, whose “long stuff” did not suit Jimmy’s style.

And nor did he like the way the Molineux directors treated their manager, Stan Cullis. Which explains why he was very soon willing to contemplate Second Division football at Southampton – always provided their manager could get him there in one piece. A fee of £30,000, a record-outlay by Southampton, clinched the deal and Melia delivered as “the schemer in a tremendously attacking team,” as he recalled in Ian Carnaby’s 2005 match-day interview. Hardly missing a game during the Saints’ promotion campaign of 1965-66, his “greatest memories” include his winner at Plymouth in the run-in.

He was then ever-present in the club’s inaugural season in the First Division and played regularly in 1967-68, too.

He was now the wrong side of 30, though, and a ready scapegoat for impatient fans when things were not running smoothly.

So, early in the 1968-69 season, he moved to Fourth Division Aldershot, as player-coach. There followed a globe-trotting career, although his two further jobs back in England included a memorable spell with Brighton, who would be relegated from Division I in 1983, while having enjoyed a memorable FA Cup campaign under Jimmy. With Jimmy Case scoring for them in four successive rounds, including the shock-winner at Anfield, Brighton went all the way to a replayed Final, which they lost to Manchester United.But he was soon flying back and forth again, until he settled in Dallas, where he found steady work, coaching youngsters. He was still coaching youngsters at the LFC International Academy in the States when he reached 80 as he explained to the Liverpool FC website “most kids in Europe want to play professionally, whereas in America parents want them to go to college, so  we can get them a scholarship by playing soccer, then that’s going to help them”.