Having been voted by his peers to keep goal for the PFA’s Championship Team-of the-Year for 2004-05, Ipswich’s Kelvin Davis moved, with high hopes, to Sunderland, newly- promoted from that division. A year later, he arrived at second-tier Southampton, having just been part of a Sunderland team that had been relegated from the Premiership with an all-time low tally of points. Here was his chance to rebuild his confidence under George Burley, while reuniting with Malcolm Webster, who’d been his goalkeeping coach when he was a trainee at Luton, pretty much his home-town club.

It was a tough time for a new ’keeper to be coming to St Mary’s. The huge favourite, Antti Niemi, had left six months earlier and the Saints had failed, in his absence, to gain instant promotion back to the top-flight. They still had the second season of “parachute” payments, however, to mount another bid and Kelvin feels that “we had the team to do it.” So it was a blow to be eliminated in the play-offs, an experience he had twice had at Ipswich.

In 2008-09, Kelvin had comfortably scooped all of the club’s seasonal awards and yet he ended up captaining a relegated side.

He found the demotion to League One less shattering than dropping out of the Premiership with Sunderland, partly because of those record-low points, but also, he explains, because of the manner in which Sunderland “went down – without a fight.” Kelvin certainly rose to the challenge of getting out of the third-tier, generally demonstrating leadership and assurance behind a rather callow team – an inspiration not only to his team-mates but to his growing band of supporters, seemingly heartened by his decision to stay with the sunken ship. Having lived through the troubling summer of 2009, administration and all,

Kelvin had come close to agreeing on a move to Premiership West Ham. But he instead accepted the three-year contract that Southampton offered him, on the very day that the club was bought by Markus Liebherr.

Ever-present in the promotion season of 2010-11, Kelvin’s 20 clean sheets posted a new post-war record for the club. He then captained the side that won promotion to the Premiership at the first time of asking and was voted – again – into the PFA’s Championship Team-of-the-Year. During that 2011-12 season, he overtook the club’s post-war appearance-records of three goalkeepers, in turn: John Christie, Peter Shilton, and Tim Flowers. And while he’d now played more League games than Eric Martin, he was still just behind his 289 appearances, overall. His chances of overtaking Martin, let alone Tommy Allen’s all-time record of 323 games, were threatened by the signings first of Paulo Gazzaniga and then of Artur Boruc and Fraser Forster. Yet, as he started the 2013-14 season as deputy to Boruc, Kelvin retained two personal goals: to fulfill the remaining part of his contract; and to make his 300th appearance for the Saints.

While the disappointments of relegations and play-off defeats have been compensated for by such thrills as holding aloft the Johnston’s Paint Trophy at Wembley in 2010 and by winning promotion to the Premiership in 2012, Kelvin nominates, as his high-spot for Southampton, the victory at Plymouth on 2 May 2011.

Those Saints fans who were there will remember the emotional scenes at the final whistle, but Kelvin says he has “never known” an atmosphere like the one on the team-coach returning to Southampton that evening. After his last game, in October 2015, Kelvin was given the position of Football Development Executive in July 2016, but in December 2017 he was appointed as an assistant first-team coach following the resignation of Eric Black. In December 2018 he was very briefly put in charge when Mark Hughes was dismissed and maintained his coaching role under Ralph Hasenhuttl up until May 2022 when along with two others from the coaching staff he was dismissed.