Terry Curran’s spell as a Southampton player was short but not particularly sweet. It was, however, memorable. In little more than seven months as a Saint, he scored only once – v Leeds in the 1979 League Cup semi-final – but that guaranteed the club their second Wembley final in less than three years.

A true one-goal wonder, then, if not to everyone’s tastes. One of eight brothers, Terry never lacked kick-about companions. Spotted in local boys’ football by Doncaster’s Maurice Setters, he was offered an alternative path to the paint-spraying apprenticeship he had started. Five years later, Lawrie McMenemy, responding to a request by Ted MacDougall to buy a winger, paid Derby £60,000 and explained to his curly-haired, mustachioed acquisition that

“crosses are what it’s all about; that’s why we’ve bought you.” 

McMenemy soon had cause to rue his purchase, with matters coming to a head as early as November. The Saints were losing 4-0 at Elland Road when Terry – a second-half substitute – proceeded to showboat. His embarrassed boss recorded in his diary of that season that

“his attitude annoyed me. I made up my mind that he would be away from the club by Xmas.”

Curran himself knew by then that the writing was already on the wall. Even so, he was shocked in the week after the League Cup Final, when Alan Ball introduced him to an ex-England player who was now managing in the USA. In his aptly-titled Regrets of a Football Maverick, Terry claims that he was offered a profitable “deal” of a kind that would have involved financial irregularities. That is quite a charge, but it’s in keeping with Terry’s promise that his readers will find him “brutally honest, almost to a fault.”

Ball talked Curran out of taking this offer, reasoning that, at 23, he was too young for American soccer. Little more than a week later, a deal was concluded nearer to home with Jack Charlton’s Sheffield Wednesday, then in the Third Division. In profit to a tune of £40,000, McMenemy explained the move as Curran “opting to become a bigger fish in a smaller pool.” For his part, Terry saw Wednesday as “a better club” than Southampton, with “a lot more potential.” Having moved across town to Bramall Lane – the “craziest” of his many poor decisions, he reckons – Terry was very soon offered First Division football at Everton. He featured in the side that won the championship in 1985, but missed out on the FA Cup Final, both in that season and the one before, although he did play in the 1984 semi-final v Southampton. Incredibly, given the nature of their relationship, McMenemy signed Terry for Sunderland in 1986. He was impressed that Lawrie was “happy to let bygones be bygones,” but it ended in tears, with Terry bitter and, as his autobiography demonstrates, unforgiving. Terry’s career “splattered to a halt,” as he puts it, soon after he turned 30, with his knees being the main problem, and he started a successful pallet business, to which end he bought some land that also incorporated a transport café. Having sold up to property developers in 2004, he then went back into coaching youngsters at Barnsley, Rotherham and, finally, Doncaster Rovers, his first club.

    The dust-jacket of his 2012 autobiography sums him up as

“brilliant and unpredictable on the pitch, argumentative and hot-headed off it.”

It is little wonder he spent so little time playing for Lawrie McMenemy. In 2018 Terry “raffled off” his League Cup medal which was won by Saints fan Steve Eckersley, who then donated it to Southampton FC to be put on display.