With the passing of time, memories of ex-players may fade and yet their status may continue to grow to legendary proportions. John McGrath falls into that category for a generation of Southampton fans who can close their eyes and conjure up an image of a barn-door in a red-and-white shirt.

With his rolled-up sleeves, shorts hitched high to emphasise implausibly bulging thigh-muscles, an old-fashioned haircut and a body dripping with baby oil, “Big Jake” cut an imposing figure – as seen here in a caricature, only slightly exaggerated, by his team-mate, Ron Davies. As his Independent obituary put it, John’s “lurid public persona was something between Desperate Dan and Attila the Hun.” In that vein, Peter Vine has recalled his one first-team game for the Saints, in the Third Division at Bury in 1959, when a challenge from McGrath felt like hitting “a brick wall”.

Yet when John left Bury – his first League club after he’d not made the grade at Bolton – Charlie Mitten, who signed him for Second Division Newcastle, likened this “gentle, educated” footballer to Neil Franklin,

surely one of England’s most cultured centre-halves.

In short, John “wasn’t hard enough for Newcastle.” Confronted with that description, Bates agreed that McGrath had been “neat and dainty” – until Joe Harvey took over at Newcastle and “got him more aggressive.”

Too aggressive for the liking of Bill Shankly. When Liverpool came to The Dell in September 1970, McGrath went up for a ball with Alun Evans and, as the Echo viewed it, the two of them “collided in mid-air and Evans fell awkwardly.” That might have been that – as Denis Hollywood, who was near the incident, has observed, “you couldn’t mean to head somebody on the back of his head, could you? – but Evans’s “awkward” fall resulted in his swallowing his tongue. An apoplectic Shankly, who “thought the boy had broken his neck,” held McGrath responsible and generally accused his hosts of “alehouse football.”

John admitted that his challenge was “hard” and accepted responsibility for the “Ale House” label that stuck.

Terry Paine, who was in the England U-23 side for which John won his one cap, admired his aggression and ability in the air, yet found him “very one-pace; very one-dimensional.” But Jimmy Gabriel rated John as his no-nonsense partner at centre-back. Strikingly, Jimmy would go forward to score from set-pieces, but John scored only once for the Saints and had only five goals to show, overall, for his 489 League appearances. That’s because his role in the opponents’ penalty area was, as he put it, to be the “disturber”. A dozen games into the 1972-73 season, John made way for Paul Bennett and had a brief loan-spell at Brighton. His come-back for a game at Coventry in September 1973 ended in his being substituted, whereupon manager-designate McMenemy told him to throw his boots into the trainer’s bucket – a symbolic end to his playing career. He was immediately put in charge of the youth team and was a track-suited member of the coaching crew at Wembley in 1976.

He then had a stint with the Reserves, before he left for a managerial career in which he twice achieved promotion from Division IV – with Port Vale in 1983 and Preston in 1987.He later scouted for Southampton, but his main activities in his fifties were as a pundit for Radio Lancashire and as an after-dinner speaker. John had that rare ability – so sadly lacking from many an ex-player’s autobiography – of being able to entertain orally with a side-splitting yarn that remained funny when reproduced on the printed page. Witness Mark Fickling’s recall, in Full-Time at The Dell, of meeting Big Jake, on local radio-duty, in February 1998. And when Dell Diamond was launched in November of that same year, it included John’s hilarious account of how he came to sign for Ted Bates and get through his Dell medical – obviously honed on the after-dinner circuit and yet both plausible and readable.But six weeks later, on Christmas Day 1998, John died suddenly, aged only 60.