Born in Malta, where his father had been posted with the Civil Service, Paul Tisdale returned to England, to attend the same Bath schools, from infant to senior level, as Jason Dodd. Like Jason, Paul attended the Bath satellite of the Saints Academy.

He never served a Dell apprenticeship, though, having won a sports scholarship to Millfield, the Somerset public school.

A talented cricketer, he played for the MCC in the summer of 1994, alongside Ian Botham (see scrapbook secion). He had by then had three seasons of fairly regular football for Southampton’s Reserves and, shortly after that cricketing summer, he made his first-team debut, coming off the bench in a Coca-Cola Cup-tie.

Alan Ball would use him as a playing sub a few more times that season, while Dave Merrington would give him five starts in his Premiership midfield in 1995-96.

On the second of those occasions, at Maine Road, Paul scored his only first-team goal: one touch and over the ’keeper’s head. “Delicately” done, said the Echo, of his spectacular effort.

When Merrington went in the summer of 1996, Paul’s Southampton career went, too. Graeme Souness had no use for him and Paul dropped down the divisions, one by one, to Southern League Yeovil, with a year out to play overseas. His 10 straight starts for Exeter in 1997-98 would prove to be his longest sustained spell of League football. Paul’s playing days ended at Yeovil, where he succumbed, aged 26, to persistent back problems. The offer of a job at the University of Bath changed his luck – and he, in turn, changed the face of university football, as we had known it in the 20th century. In 2002-03, he took Team Bath into the competition’s First Round Proper – the first university side to advance to that stage since Oxford in 1880.

When Mansfield Town came to the university’s playing fields for the tie, so did the live-TV cameras. Mansfield won 4-2, but Team Bath continued to scale the pyramid, as the ever dapper Paul developed his own blue-print for the game, within the “pure environment”, as he saw it, of the university. Although he’d been in no great hurry to leave that environment, he accepted the manager’s post at Exeter City in June 2006. He soon got them out of the Conference and they were promoted, in 2009, to League One, as the Saints entered it from the other direction. Although the Grecians returned to League Two in 2012, Paul was their statistically most successful manager, ever. As achievements on a puny budget tend to command the attention of chairmen with largesse to spend, Paul was inevitably been linked with vacancies at “bigger” clubs, including Southampton in 2010.

By staying put, though, he became the current longest-serving manager at any club in the Football League when Arsène Wenger left Arsenal in May 2018, but his seniority title lasted a matter of weeks as he left Exeter in the June to manage Milton Keynes Dons. He started well, leading them to automatic promotion to League One but then the following season a solitary point from nine games sealed his fate. A year out of the game followed until Bristol Rovers offered him their managerial position in November 2020. When he was sacked from that position in February 2021 he spent the remainder of the season in an advisory role at Colchester United.

In the autumn of 2024 he popped up in the most unlikliest of positions in Glasgow. He remained Celtic’s DoF until resigning amid much turmoil at the club in January 2026.