Despite being a part-timer, doubling as a bricklayer, Clydebank’s 20 year-old outside right, Gerry O’Brien, was attracting interest, as the 1970 transfer-deadline approached, from English First Division clubs.

Summoned north by Campbell Forsyth – his former ’keeper, by now his Scottish scout – Ted Bates watched Gerry score in a 1-1 draw with East Fife and made his move. He duly reported back to his Board that a fee of £22,500 – a record for the Scottish Second Division – had secured them a player who, once in full-time training,

“could become a younger edition of Terry Paine.”

Such a managerial boast would doubtless appear, today, on the club’s website, but Bates’s prediction simply went into the Board’s Minutes, never to see the light of day until it was quoted in his 1998 biography. Which was just as well for all parties, as Gerry was unable to meet those expectations.

He’d heard of Terry Paine, but “didn’t know how good he was.” Paine “was just too good to replace,” Gerry reckons. “I could nae get by him.” Not that he would always be competing with Paine, who would increasingly be deployed in a tucked-in role. Indeed, Gerry ended that 1969-70 season wearing No.7, with Paine at No.10. And in 1971-72, Gerry had a sustained run at No.10, while Paine was on the wing or even on the bench. That run included an FA Cup replay at Old Trafford, which Gerry considers to have been his best game for the Saints, with the Echo describing two of his passes to Paine as “exquisite” and “superb”, respectively. It wasn’t his fault that only one of them produced a goal, let alone that the match was lost 4-1.

Gerry’s second run of appearances came in the Second Division, with Paine now gone, in 1974-75. But his sweetest moment of that season was a Texaco Cup-tie at Ibrox, when his family of Celtic supporters saw him score in a 3-1 win v Rangers. He started the next season wearing No.7 in what had become a rather wingless formation, but soon gave way to Hugh Fisher, after breaking a bone in a leg in the September which sidelined him for a couple of months. He twice came on as a sub during the FA Cup-run, but was sold, in another deadline-transfer, to Third Division Swindon. Ever-present for them in what remained of that season, Gerry was handicapped by a cartilage injury in 1976-77 and returned at the end of it, on a free transfer, to Clydebank.

Then, after a few games at Hibs, he quit in 1979 with arthritis. He briefly coached Clydebank’s Reserves, before setting up a building firm, which he has continued to run with his sons. Gerry regrets leaving Southampton when he did. Of the 15 players involved in the Cup-run, he was the only one not at Wembley. What’s more, he became, literally, the forgotten man of the Saints’ 1976 triumph – until he was interviewed for Tie a Yellow Ribbon, Tim Manns’s 2006 book on how Southampton won the Cup. When his wife Maureen and he came down from Duntocher for the book’s launch and the 30th-anniversary dinner, their enjoyment at being belatedly included was palpable.

Gerry had two brothers who played in Scotland’s First Division (see scrapbook section for details).