As a pupil at St Mary’s College in Southampton, Nick Holmes felt that his school mate, Pat Earles, “stood out” more as a footballer. The England Schools selectors agreed – to the extent that, after the two of them had played in the southern trial, Pat would be capped, while Nick wasn’t. But the ever-watchful Tom Parker had noted the young ‘reject’ and duly brought him to The Dell, aged 15½, be taken on by Ted Bates. Towards the end of the season in which Bates formally handed over to Lawrie McMenemy, Nick made his debut.

He modestly attributes his subsequent success to two pieces of luck. He was “lucky as hell”, he explained in ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’, to have been “born in the right place at the right time”, so that he was soon playing “with the right people” whom McMenemy was recruiting – his ‘violinists’, as he put it, whose skills were complimented by the graft of the ‘road-sweepers’ like Nick. He had no quarrel with that label, reasoning that his progress was greatly assisted by his second piece of good fortune: he was left-footed. This “was the best thing that could have happened to me” he explains.

“Right-footers are ten-a-penny, but there just aren’t so many left-footers”.

His arithmetic is sound enough, but that doesn’t explain Alan Ball’s recall of Nick – for the Echo in 2003 – as having been

“one of the best pound-for-pound pros I ever played with in my entire career. I loved playing alongside him and he was always terrific – he would get you goals, he could defend. I never thought he had a bad game”.

McMenemy and his successor, Chris Nicholl, evidently agreed with that last assessment, to the extent that Nick was dropped just the once. In April 1983, he was left out at Old Trafford – but came off the bench in time to contribute to the goal that earned a point. He went on to make 543 first-team appearances, earning him third place in the all-time rankings, behind Terry Paine and Mick Channon.

In each of the seasons from 1975-76 to 1981-82, he never missed more than four League games, occasioned by ligament problems or suspension.

His only ever-present season was 1983-84, when the club finished runners-up to Liverpool in Division I and lost an FA Cup semi-final, to Everton. Nick rates Everton’s 1-0 win at Highbury as his “biggest-ever low” – much more so than losing a League Cup Final”. In that 1979 Final v Nottingham Forest, Nick and David Peach, the two left-sided ‘road-sweepers’ who had blotted out Manchester United’s right flank in the 1976 FA Cup Final, became the first two – and, so far only – players to represent the club in two major Wembley Finals. What’s more Nick hit a consolation screamer past Peter Shilton– then “the best goalkeeper in the world”, he reckons – in the 3-2 defeat. Nick can recall other long-range specials among his 64 goals for the Saints, yet he enthuses, typically, about a goal in which he had a walk-on part. When Channon scored his last goal Saints goal, Nick was a spectator for most of the 16-touch move. Nicholl headed down to him, he played a one-two with Dave Armstrong and hit the ball down the line. “Then I just watched in admiration,” he recalls “as it developed”. (The goal can be seen on Channon’s profile)

His last start was in the first leg of his second League Cup semi-final v Liverpool, in March 1987 – his fifth semi-final in all. Struggling with a pelvic injury, he made his final appearance three days later, as a sub at Tottenham. Following a sabbatical year with East Cowes, he took up Nicholl’s offer of a job at The Dell.

He enjoyed his year as the Reserves’ coach and overseer of the scouting network, but calculated that he could earn a better living running the village store in Middle Winterslow in Wilts.

After 10 years of that, he upped sticks for Florida, where he already had a holiday home. When his wife, Carolyn, developed arthritis Florida’s climate was an ideal antidote and a move there, with Nick going into property management made perfect sense. The job wasn’t really what he wanted however and in 2003 he found himself back in this country managing Salisbury City with his son Matthew then a member of the team. Salisbury won promotion to the Conference in 2006 and then reached the FA Cup Second Round the following season, for only the second time in in the club’s history, going out to Nottingham Forest after two games, both of them live on TV. That was as good as it got. In 2009, Salisbury went into administration. In the restructuring that followed, Nick lost the chairman with whom he had enjoyed a mutual trust. So he called it a day. That trust had been crucial to Nick in a job for which he had long considered himself unsuited. Quite simply he didn’t feel he could be “nasty” enough to be a manager and, in particular, he’d be incapable of lying to players. Supported by his chairman, he felt able to avoid the obligatory lies. After spending some time working in the Amesbury offices of Oakley Sunglasses, Nick has returned back to Florida to live.