On the tenth anniversary of his arrival as a player at St Marys, Nigel Adkins responding to a tweet by the ex-Tunisian defender Radhi Jaidi, said

“during my time at The Saints you were the rock at the heart of the defence and a fantastic senior professional. So pleased to see you doing well with the development of the younger players”.

That was a generous compliment especially as Jaidi had only served under Adkins for less than a year, but it was a promotion season with him contributing to the club having the best defensive record in the third tier. His first game on British soil had come when he made his Bolton debut at St Marys in 2004.

The first Tunisian to feature in the Premiership, he had the build of a heavy weight boxer and was a powerful and dominant presence in the heart of any defence.

He was a member of the Tunisian squad who won the 2004 African Nations Cup and was their skipper four years later in the same competition. All in all he won 105 caps for his country. After Alan Pardew signed him for Saints there was a slight delay while his international clearance came through, but once it had, he became an integral part of the squad which won the JPT in 2010, although in his mid-30s he was sometimes rested when there were two games in a week. In the summer following that promotion to the Championship he picked up a knee injury that required an operation which side-lined him for the whole of 2011-12.

He retired from playing in May 2012 and was immediately appointed as the club’s overseas development ambassador with a remit to particularly concentrate on his native continent. After shadowing Martin Hunter, coach of the U21s he later took charge of the U23s, until November 2019 when the club announced he was to do on a 12-month secondment to Hartford Athletic who play in the 2^nd tier of the American football pyramid.

In February 2021 he took up an assistant manager position in Belgium, but within months had become a manager in his own right back in Tunisia.