Of all the Boys of ’76, Tim Manns suggested, in Tie a Yellow Ribbon, that Jim Steele, man-of-the-match at Wembley, was “arguably the one with the most reason to look back with at least some measure of regret for the lack of further success and achievement in the game.”

Any Saints fan who watched that Cup-winning side would surely share Manns’s assessment of a player who was lost to League football at only 27. From the way in which Jim exudes bonhomie – just stop him on the St Mary’s concourse of a match-day and you’ll experience it – he does not appear to be somebody who harbours regrets. But you’ll need to keep off the subjects of Anderlecht, US dollars and cortisone, of which more below. Jim had joined Dundee as a 17 year-old. Briefed by Ted Bates to find him

“a left-sided player who was hard,”

Campbell Forsyth reckoned that Steele, by now in his fifth season at Dens Park, fitted the bill, although he canvassed a favourable second opinion from Jock Stein. Which is why Bates hurried to Dens Park in January 1972 and hastened Jim on to a plane. It was an excited young Scot who reported early for training the next day. He had found his peg in the dressing-room and had begun to strip when Ron Davies arrived to put him in his place.

“Are you that guy from Scotland we’ve just signed?” “Aye!” “A lot of money for a freckle,” came the put-down.

Ron was right. The £80,000 fee was not just a lot of money; it was a Southampton record. 

But where could you find a Saints supporter of that era who did not consider it money well spent? Bates had acquired

a tall, tough, aggressive defender, who boasted, almost paradoxically, a most cultured left foot.

Jim acclimatised in midfield for a few games before he was introduced, the hard way, to life as a First Division centre-back – in the infamous 7-0 defeat at Leeds. He was soon restored to midfield, but Jimmy Gabriel, the ex-Dundee player whom he had effectively been bought to replace, left in the summer of 1972. So now, over the next two seasons – which meant surviving the arrival of Lawrie McMenemy and the relegation that followed – Jim would pretty much make the No.6 shirt his own, alongside John McGrath and Paul Bennett, in turn.

Early in the 1974-75 season, McMenemy bought Mel Blyth and began to ring the changes, although it wasn’t until December 1975 that the Blyth-Steele partnership became anything like regular. The rest is FA Cup history. But now the Cup-winning side needed to be remodelled for promotion. As McMenemy reshuffled his pack in 1976-77, with Malcolm Waldron now teamed with Blyth, Jim had to endure a “nightmare” loan at Ibrox before he renewed his partnership with Blyth, in time to participate in an FA Cup-run and the Third Round of the Cup-Winners Cup. Jim blew it.

On 8 March 1977, at 1-1 in an Old Trafford Cup replay, a robust challenge by United’s Jimmy Greenhoff ripped his shirt. Jim continued the dispute until Clive Thomas sent him off for “persistent infringements”. Although displeased, McMenemy played Jim, a week later, in the second leg of a Cup-Winners Cup-tie v Anderlecht. With the aggregate score at 2-2 in the dying minutes at The Dell, Jim allowed an innocuous ball to pass under his foot, to present Franky Van Der Elst with the winning goal. One final League game would be his lot before McMenemy packed him off to the USA, to play for the Dips. It still rankles with Jim that the financial deal wasn’t what he felt he had been led to believe.

But he found enough football in the USA to recoup a few dollars, before a knee-injury brought his playing days to an end. He stayed in the country, initially as a foreman in an electrical plant, after which he opened a bar in Washington DC. But he now had another disappointment when a US doctor told him that cortisone injections – to which so many players of his generation, Mick Channon included, have attributed their mid-life arthritis – had rendered him infertile.

He went home to Edinburgh in 1995, but couldn’t settle. He came back to Southampton, where he ran a number of pubs. After which, he moved to the Cotswolds, where, from 2002, he ran the Black Bear in Moreton-in-Marsh. That became an ideal pit-stop for Saints fans returning from northern venues but, after 10 years there, Jim came back south, to live at Waltham Chase and more recently he has moved to a mobile home in Allington Lane near West End.