On 28 April 2012, Billy Sharp scored in Southampton’s promotion-clinching win v Coventry City to round off what he described to the Daily Mail as an “every-emotion-you-can-think-of season.”

On 29 October 2011, Billy’s son, Luey, died, just two days-old. Three days later, Billy captained Doncaster Rovers to a home win in the Championship v Middlesbrough – “the longer I’d left it,” he explained to the Guardian, “the harder it would have been.” When he scored, he raised his shirt to reveal a slogan on his T-shirt: “That’s for you, Son.” Tony Mowbray, Boro’s manager, described it as “a goal from heaven.” For Billy, it proved the restorative powers of football – “a very special sport,” in that regard, he reckons. He needed to be restored again, a month later, when Gary Speed – a friend from their time at Sheffield United, Billy’s home-town club that had released him but later brought him back – was found hanged. Billy responded by scoring the only goal of the game, six days later, as Doncaster lifted themselves off the foot of the Championship by beating top-of-the-table Southampton.

The relief was temporary. Doncaster would be relegated, not helped by Nigel Adkins, who had managed Billy at Scunthorpe, swooping in the January window, to annex the Rovers’ talisman, an investment that might yet secure the Saints’ promotion. It worked.

Billy played in all but three of the 18 remaining games, scoring nine times in the 11 matches that he started. But even then, there was pain-in-victory, as St Mary’s celebrated the promotion-clincher v Coventry. As several of his team-mates brought their children out on to the pitch, Billy inevitably thought of how Luey “could have been here now, in his kit.” Whatever the capacity of football to be restorative, anti-climaxes are invariably waiting round the corner. Billy may have signed a three-and-a-half-year deal for Adkins, but there was nothing in that contract to guarantee him Premiership football.

In a busy summer, Adkins signed Jay Rodriguez, Emmanuel Mayuka and Gastón Ramirez. So Billy’s Premier League opportunities were restricted to two fleeting releases from the bench, before he departed on loan. Given that Sean O’Driscoll, who had managed him at Doncaster, had assured the Echo that Billy was the

“most indispensable striker I have ever worked with,”

it was hardly surprising that he should take this “priceless asset”, as he described him, to Nottingham Forest. While it might be said that Billy was back in his comfort-zone of Championship football, it sometimes seemed that he had only to score for Forest – as he did 10 times in that division – before somebody on a fans’ forum at Southampton would be suggesting that he was the striker needed to preserve the Saints’ Premiership status. When he returned come the summer, however, he was again packed off to the Championship – this time at Reading, for a third club with Adkins. He left for good in August 2014 without adding to those two substitute Premier League outings but the story has a happy ending for once back with his home-town club he played a part in the Blades winning promotion to the top-flight in 2019 and aged 33 Billy was deservedly back in the big time. In January 2022 with Sheffield back in the Championship he scored for them in a match against Peterborough, his 122nd in that league and that set a new record.