A year is a long time in football. In May 1976, the Saints’ right-back and captain, Peter Rodrigues, led his team up the 39 Wembley steps – that climb of which every aspiring footballer has surely dreamed – to collect the FA Cup from The Queen. Yet, little more than 12 months later, he was playing in the Hampshire League for Romsey Town, whose little ground is dwarfed and overshadowed by the neighbouring Broadlands Estate, then the home of the Queen’s uncle, Louis Mountbatten. Southampton might have signed him sooner – that’s Rodrigues, not Lord Mountbatten – but each party had entertained doubts about the other.

Peter had left his home-town Cardiff City in 1965 for First Division Leicester and was part of the side that lost in the FA Cup Final and suffered relegation in 1969. A year later, he was available for sale. Ted Bates was interested, but reported to the Board that Peter would be “too great” a risk, “owing to Achilles trouble.” Seemingly having no such qualms, freshly-relegated Sheffield Wednesday signed Peter on for more second-tier fare.Which is how he came to be playing at the Dell in December 1974, when the Saints contrived to lose 1-0 to Wednesday, a team that would not win another game all season.

Peter had heard that Lawrie McMenemy “was sort of interested” in him; but having witnessed the “stick” that the manager was getting from the home fans

Peter told his team-mates that he wouldn’t join Southampton “if they were the last club in the Football League.”

Well, not until the summer, that is. Now relegated to Division III, Wednesday made the 31 year-old Rodrigues available on a free transfer. With Steve Mills struggling to recover from car-crash injuries, McMenemy signed Peter as a stop-gap. Peter had won his 40th, and last cap, for Wales in Poland in 1973, but he had retained some of the speed with which he had been a schoolboy sprint-champion. Yet that hardly predicted that, in 1975-76, he would miss only one League match and none of the FA Cup-run, taking over as captain in October, when the unsettled Mick Channon opted out of the job. And so it was Peter who led the triumphant underdogs up those Wembley steps. A knee-injury, incurred in training come October, effectively ended Peter’s professional career and, after his brief spell with Romsey, he was coaching in California and then some less exotic corners of Hampshire. Part-time coaching duties could be combined with running the King Rufus in Eling.

He later had the Whitemill Inn, near Caernarfon, but returned to Southampton, to run a café and then the Shirley Conservative Club. Following the death of his wife in 1998, he moved to Spain but, finding that he “missed Southampton,” he came back again. He had initially been able to deck out his pub with his memorabilia, but he gave his Cup-winners’ medal to his daughter. In October 2004, she put it up for auction, against his wishes. The club saved the day by buying it for £10,200, to be displayed at St Mary’s. But you can’t take away his memories of 1 May 1976 and he has found it “simply amazing” that people have continued to quiz him about that special day in the club’s history. When asked whether “collecting the Cup from the Queen was the greatest moment of my life,” he has always replied “no – it was turning left and lifting it to the Saints fans, a few seconds later. That was the greatest moment.”