When Derek Statham made his debut in 1976 as a full-back for West Brom, he demonstrated his capacity for getting forward in the best possible way. He completed a solo run by beating Stoke’s Peter Shilton.

He didn’t keep it up – his remaining 298 League appearances for the Baggies brought only seven more goals –

but he did continue to surge down the left flank, at an electrifying pace.

He could scare not only the opposition, but his Albion team-mates, too. As John Wile, a fellow-defender, put it, Derek “used to scare me to death, when he used to bomb forward.” There was no doubting that Derek, fierce in the tackle, knew how to defend. Tom Finney, no less, reportedly said that he was the best full-back he had ever seen. The England manager, Bobby Robson, didn’t go that far, but had it not been for the consistency of Arsenal’s Kenny Sansom, Derek would surely have won more than three caps. During 1986-87, his 11th season at The Hawthorns, he felt he was “stagnating” and he was about to join Liverpool.

But the deal fell through, because Liverpool’s doctors were unhappy with some scar tissue from an old Achilles operation. Chris Nicholl, anxious to replace Mark Dennis, had no such qualms about signing Derek, come August, for a knock-down fee of £100,000. He was in time to play 38 games straight games in 1987-88 and was voted the fans’ Player-of-the-Season, amply vindicating Nicholl’s gamble.

Ever-present the following season, until the turn of the year, he then struggled with an unrelated injury and gave way to the incoming Micky Adams. He still had almost 100 League games left in him, though, as he dropped down a division to Stoke and to the basement with Walsall, before a final non-league flurry.

After which, he moved to Andalucia in southern Spain, where he became involved, in 2008, in a business selling spas and hot tubs. He also participates in corporate golf days on the Costa Del Sol fairways.