Although Ted Bates liked to “buy direct” from Scotland – and spent a lot of time there, to that end – he was not averse to bringing in Scots who had proved themselves in the Football League. Glaswegian Ian White was just such a player. Although he had had four games as a Scottish junior international, he faced tough competition, latterly from Pat Crerand, to get a game at wing-half for his home-town Celtic. Without ever making the first team, he joined the exodus of footballers crossing the border in order, as Ian puts it, “to move to a better life.” He fared better, overall, at First Division Leicester, although, having played three times in their 1960 FA Cup-run, he missed out on the Final. Up for sale in the summer of 1962, Ian was expecting to join Chelsea, newly-relegated to Division II under Tommy Docherty, who’d attended his school in Glasgow. When the deal collapsed, he signed for Southampton.

In their calamitous start to the 1962-63 season, he alternated with Ken Wimshurst for the No.4 shirt. Ian had got the nod when Chelsea came to The Dell in September and he scored his first goal for the club. Ken would not only be a leading light, however, in the side that progressed, unchanged, to the 1963 FA Cup semi-final, but would get much more Second Division football than Ian, all the way through to 1966 run-in, when Ian played in the last 10 games of the push to promotion.

Now the wrong side of 30, Ian nevertheless started the 1966-67 season in possession, but soon gave way again to Wimshurst – until the competition between them was rendered redundant by the arrival of Hugh Fisher, a fellow-Glaswegian who had been sampling the “better life” at Blackpool.

Ian’s competition with Wimshurst, for the best part of four seasons was a product of the times. While he would have liked to play more – and told the manager so – he acknowledges that, with the destructive Cliff Huxford at left-half, the “balance” of the side required somebody to be “free” at right-half – a role for which he felt Wimshurst had “a lot of talent”.

Even so, Bates, who would sometimes deploy White to do “marking jobs” away from home,

told Ian that he’d ideally like to use Ian away and Ken at home. Such a strategy was less practicable in those days before tactical substitutes were permitted. As Ian sees it, in today’s game, he “would be a squad-player”, coming on or off as the situation of the game demanded.

That was not the case in 1967, when Ian decamped to the Southern League. A badly shattered ankle – he still has the pin – having ended his serious playing career, Ian went on to enjoy non-league management, while occasionally turning out for the Ex-Saints. He opened a sports shop in Totton with Ron Davies, the full-back whose Southampton career was fading out as Ian’s began. That business lasted for 26 years. In retirement in the New Forest, he has continued to play golf and to enjoy meeting up with former Saints – including Hugh Fisher, the signing who resolved Ted Bates’s long-running White v Wimshurst conundrum.