Imagine how you might feel if you’d let in four goals at home on your debut, even if you have saved a penalty. Might it be a consolation that your strikers – Ron Davies, with his first League hat-trick for the Saints, and Martin Chivers – have matched that tally and that the ’keeper who’d let in four at the other end was World-Cup winner, Gordon Banks, the holder of 36 England caps and counting?

It was certainly quite a fillip for 20 year-old Gerry Gurr to be complimented by Banks as the two of them left the pitch.

Gurr has retained a “nice memory” of Banks saying “I’ll have to watch out for my England place.” And Ted Bates was fairly pleased, too – sufficiently to promise Gerry that he’d keep his place, provided he could get fit. But having played most of his debut “on one leg”, after having been “shot full of cortisone,” Gerry did not recover in time for that.

He was soon fit for purpose with the Reserves, however, and duly lined up for the first team, in a friendly at Portsmouth, encouraged by his manager to think that he could now make the position his. But Bates didn’t even watch the game: he was in Scotland buying Eric Martin. Which explains why it was September 1968 – 20 months after his debut – before Gerry returned to First Division action. It was an awesome experience – “I was the only one in the programme,” he recalls, “that I’d never heard of.” And yet he so excelled – keeping his place for the rest of the season and for the first six games of the next – as to excite press speculation that he had an England future. But then, with Banks’s words looking increasingly prescient, Gerry was sidelined by a shoulder that had popped out again – a recurrence of a dislocation sustained way back in October 1966. A surgeon removed the offending bones – “which I’ve got in a jar to this day”, Gerry jokes – but his Southampton career was over. Asked when he was about to make his comeback whether he fancied playing for Saints again he answered “No I don’t think they gave me a particularly square deal when I had this trouble so I shall not be going there, that’s certain”. As it was he was still capable of playing 55 League games for Fourth Division Aldershot, managed by his former Saints team-mate, Jimmy Melia, but Gerry was going to be prematurely in need of an alternative career. Music.

Having played the guitar since he was eight, Gerry assembled a group, The Sunsets, while with Southampton, that included Micky Judd on drums and Dave Paton singing. Although plenty of team-mates turned up, of a Saturday evening, to hear them at Trant’s After 8 night-club in Shirley, Gerry assumed that Ted Bates knew nothing of their moon-lighting – until Paton was transferred to Aldershot and the manager informed Gerry, matter-of-factly, that “I’ve just sold your singer.”

After football Gerry caught a plane to the Far East where he had lined up some gigs with a band and auditioned the professional female vocalist Lee Ann to sing with him. They would later marry and Gerry would become her musical director from their home in the Cotswolds.