Although Dan Harding had been voted League One’s top left-back in 2010-11, manager Nigel Adkins nevertheless signed Burnley’s Danny Fox in the summer of 2011 on a four-year contract. A regular during the Championship season of 2011-12, Danny ventured forward to provide many an assist, while his in-swinging free-kicks and corners fulfilled the manager’s promise that he would contribute

“great set-play delivery”.

When the Saints opened their Premiership campaign of 2012-13, Danny was one of the few players in the squad with experience at that level, having joined Burnley from Celtic in the January window of their 2009-10 season in the top flight. Cheshire-born, Danny had won England U-21 honours but, with a Scottish grandfather legitimising a switch of allegiances, he had been capped by George Burley for Scotland v Wales in November 2009. As that Premier League season got under way, Southampton were conceding too many goals – even when they were scoring them – as typified by Danny getting his first goal for the club at The Emirates in September 2012, when the Saints were on the end of a 6-1 drubbing.

Inevitably, questions started to be raised about every member of the “back five”, including suggestions that Danny was too often caught out of position defensively, either by pressing up the field and not being able to get back or by drifting in-field and leaving space for the opposition on their right flank. Yet not even his fiercest critics could have expected him to be “rested” at half-time in the fifth game of the season and then soon to lose his place to the 17 year-old Luke Shaw. Even so, he featured in more than half of that season’s Premiership fixtures and survived the change of managers to start the 2013-14 season as part of the first team squad but by Christmas he had played his last game for the club and he moved to Nottingham at first on loan and then permanently. After a spell at Wigan, in the autumn of 2020 he signed for his childhood hero, Robbie Fowler, the manager of East Bengal in the Indian Super League.