Arriving at The Dell from his native Bath, Jason Dodd struck manager Chris Nicholl as “a cocky fat boy with a very strong Wiltshire (sic) accent.”

It didn’t take long for Youth coach, Dave Merrington, to lick him into shape and the 18-year-old was soon making his first-team full debut, at right-back, in a 4-1 win at QPR. That score-line was repeated a week later when League leaders Liverpool visited on their way to another Championship. Crossing a near-post ball, from which Saints opened the scoring, served, Dodd reckons, to “settle” him.

Whereupon, he succeeded in subduing John Barnes, whom he rated “the top man in the country at the time.” The way in which Barnes congratulated his young marker after the game has become part of the legend of an astounding afternoon.

Jason soon developed into an all-round full-back: a competent defender who could clear his lines constructively and cross tellingly – so much so that, within the year, he was winning the first of his eight Under-21 caps. And yet he had to compete for his place at Southampton, initially when Nicholl brought in Soviet international, Aleksey Cherednik, and then as Jeff Kenna pushed ahead of him. Alan Ball, who would eventually sell Kenna, converted Dodd into a midfielder, a role for which the instructions were simple: “I just had to win the ball and give it to Matt,” Jason explains. Successive managers deployed him in that role until Dave Jones decided, in 1997, that Jason would be his right-back and captain.

The occasional reversion to midfield and odd outings at centre-back or sweeper apart, Jason stayed at No.2 for most of his remaining time with the Saints. A series of niggling injuries in 2002-03 deprived him, however, of the opportunity to lead the side out for the FA Cup Final.

His accuracy with a dead-ball was seldom put to the test, so long as Matt Le Tissier was to hand. When he wasn’t, Jason showed what he could do – with seven penalties out of seven and some devilish in-swinging corner-kicks. He was even credited with a goal direct from a corner against Portsmouth in December 2003 (see below), to the delight of his brother who collected his winnings on a £20 wager at 50-1, before the killjoy-panel declared it to be a Schemmel own goal.

By the time his League career dwindled to a halt, in loan spells dogged by injuries, he had long become the seventh Saint, post-war, to pass 400 games for the club. Following a brief stay at Eastleigh, he returned to Southampton as George Burley’s first-team coach. And when Burley answered Scotland’s call, Dodd entered into a joint-caretaker arrangement with John Gorman. That ended ignominiously in an FA Cup exit at Bristol Rovers, but Jason was not yet done with the Saints: he was brought back by Alan Pardew to coach the youngsters and all went well until he was suddenly sacked in May 2014. He quickly found a full-time appointment at Winchester College where he has remained ever since.