Although born near Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, a republic of the recently-established People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Ivan Golac joined Partizan Belgrade, in the capital of Yugoslavia’s largest republic of Serbia, at the age of 12. Once he had made the first team, he played before some very large crowds: maybe 80,000 when at home; and 100,000 in the away “derby” v Red Star.

In August 1978, however, after 16 years with his first club, he made his debut, at right-back, for Southampton before a fairly standard Dell crowd of 21,059.

He was now 28, the age at which he was no longer limited by law to playing only in communist Yugoslavia, where his father was a soldier in President Tito’s Guard.

Ivan dismisses that “silly rule” with the kind of bluntness that may have prevented this “rebel”, as he describes himself, from gaining more than four Yugoslavia caps. By his estimate, he should have had “a minimum of 50 or 60 games”. That blend of candour and self-confidence pervades the Golac chapter in Jeremy Wilson’s Cult Heroes (2006), much as it did his 1996 interview for Dell Diamond. What follows conveys only a flavour of Ivan’s reminiscences for those two books.

Free, in the summer of 1978, to play abroad, Ivan headed to Istanbul for talks with Galatasary and was ready to sign for them when he learned of Lawrie McMenemy’s interest. He had always wanted to play in England, a country whose music he had avidly collected ever since “the Beatles came along.” So an upside, as Ivan sees it, of Yugoslavia’s ban on playing abroad until 28 is that he might have gone “elsewhere in Europe” had an earlier escape been possible. He has “never regretted” coming to England – and to Southampton, in particular. The Dell attendance may have been small by Belgrade’s standards but,

“from the very first kick,” he sensed “a connection with the crowd.” What’s more, The Dell atmosphere was “fantastic…: always busy and noisy” – which he attributed to the style of football the Saints were playing.

It’s a style that can be summed up as “half-a-touch” football, as master-minded by Alan Ball, for whom Ivan’s admiration knows no bounds. The ultimate expression of that style came in “something quite special on the right-hand side,” the “smashing triangle” that Golac and Ball formed with Mick Channon. But there’s the rub. When the Saints got to Wembley, achieving one of Ivan’s long-held dreams in his first season, to face Nottingham Forest in the League Cup Final, Channon was in the final months of an interlude with Manchester City. The Saints lost 3-2, but when Forest, by now the European Cup-holders, were “destroyed”, as Ivan not unreasonably puts it, 4-1 at The Dell in November 1979, with signed-again Channon rampant, this simply proved to Ivan that, with Mick aboard, they would have triumphed at Wembley, “without any problem”.

His association with Channon afforded Ivan the ideal tutor to teach him how to swear in English. Ball’s wife, Lesley, had taken Ivan and his wife, Bratislava, to the butchers, where she used animal noises to identify the different cuts of meat. As Ivan added to the limited English he had learned from his albums of Western music, he revelled in what he describes as “beautiful football, beautiful supporters and beautiful days.” “Beautiful” is a word he uses a lot.

His swashbuckling, overlapping style was guaranteed to make him a huge favourite of the fans, even if more than one team-mate labelled him “the best right-back playing on the right wing.”

The most unforgettable demonstration of that approach was surely the goal he scored v West Brom in February 1981. Channon flick-headed the ball – “beautifully”, of course – into the stride of the galloping Golac, who was 25 yards from goal and far too wide – as Kevin Keegan pointed out to him, afterwards – to contemplate anything other than a cross.

But Ivan instead hit a half-volley into the top corner, before goalkeeper Godden could move.

The “beautiful days” ended in a dispute with McMenemy over terms and Ivan made a number of short-term moves before returning to Southampton, in March 1984. Joining a small squad chasing both the League championship and the FA Cup, he played in every match of the run-in to second place, including a few at right-half, as a stand-in for the injured Steve Williams. But Williams came back for the semi-final defeat by Everton. You will find few people, team-mates included, who thought that a wise move. Naturally, Ivan thinks he should have played.

Come the summer, Chris Nicholl succeeded McMenemy. Ivan has no argument with Nicholl’s decision to loan him to Portsmouth and then to release him. Since when, he has coached in several countries, always looking on the bright side – “wherever I am going, I will take the sun with me” – but never achieving his ambition, despite his repeated enquiries, of managing Southampton. His spell with Dundee United was notable not just for their winning the Scottish Cup for the first time, after six losing Finals, but for his ways of motivating his players. His philosophy made him the darling of the media, to whom he readily revealed his words of wisdom. “Treat the ball as if it is an intimate lady-friend,” Ivan famously advised. “Caress it!”  In May 2010, as his 60th birthday neared, Ivan hoped to return to Scotland, but failed to get the managerial vacancy at Celtic. So he has continued to shuttle between his homes in Vienna and Belgrade, pursuing his business interests, which include ownership of a chocolate factory, and those of his wife, Bratislava.