If at first you don’t succeed, try emulating Rickie Lambert.

At the start of the 2009-10 season, as he began to build a team capable of getting Southampton out of League One, Alan Pardew paid Bristol Rovers £1m for their 27 year-old striker – a gamble that other managers had not been prepared to take.

Rickie had made an impression on Fulham’s manager, Roy Hodgson, for instance, when third-tier Rovers put his Premiership side out of the FA Cup in the 2007-08 Third Round. Hodgson would confess to Sky, in August 2013, that he had thought about buying Rickie at that point, but doubted whether a League One player could “become a success in the Premier League.”

By the time of that confession, Hodgson, by now England’s manager, had his answer and was calling up Rickie for his international debut – a barely credible twist to the Lambert story. Released by his home-town Liverpool, the wannabe striker then had five years of lower-division football, mainly in centre-midfield – for Blackpool, where he hardly featured; for Macclesfield, where he turned out for expenses only; and for Stockport, where, in his last season, he “got the brunt” of the fans’ dissatisfaction.

Converting to centre-forward at Rochdale, he began to get among the goals.

He was far from prolific in his first two seasons at Bristol Rovers, however, as they won promotion via the League Two play-offs and then went on that Cup-run, in which they also put out Southampton. In that tie, his first acquaintance with the Saints, he scored the only goal, from what he admits was “a terrible free-kick” that deflected in off Jermaine Wright. But then, in 2008-09, the goals came – 29 of them to make him joint-top scorer across the four divisions. Yet still the Hodgson view of him prevailed. Feeling that he’d “ripped that League apart,” that season, Rickie was disillusioned when the offers didn’t come.

Which is why he’s so grateful that Pardew “showed belief” in him, even if it meant that he was still playing in the third tier. His response, in 2009-10, was to be the top League goal-scorer again – this time on his own, with 30 goals for the Saints – with the bonus of a JPT winners’ medal at Wembley. When Southampton won promotion, the following season, to the Championship – a level at which Rickie had never played – questions were inevitably asked: would he be found out by his lack of pace? The goals kept coming, though, and he explained to FourFourTwo, in mid-season, that

“you don’t have to be the fastest player if your movement is right.”

Rickie learned that lesson, he says, from Richard Walker, his strike-partner at Rovers, who was, “if anything,” he reckons, “a little bit slower” than he. Rickie watched, and copied, Walker’s movement off the ball. Then, at Southampton, Dean Wilkins taught Rickie more about timing his runs – for which Nick Harvey got him into shape by “working wonders for me, fitness-wise.”

Next question: would he hack it in the Premier League? Rickie’s answer: 15 goals, the joint-highest by an Englishman (see scrapbook section for his first at Manchester City). That included his 100th goal for the club. And so good was his all-round game – bringing in team-mates as he dropped deep or spun wide – that there was talk of an England cap. Yet even when Hodgson was short of fit strikers during that 2012-13 season, the call didn’t come. But it did in August 2013 for a friendly v Scotland. 

By scoring on his England debut, Rickie joined illustrious company. Just savour the names: Ted Drake, Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney, Bobby Charlton, Jimmy Greaves, Alan Shearer. But Rickie did it with his very first touch, a header, in international football. And then he came back down to earth, three days later, to win the opening game for the Saints with a penalty that brought his tally from the spot for Southampton to 29 out of 29. Before he left he was to add another 5 to that tally.

He shrugged off compliments on that 100 per cent record: think how many more Matt Le Tissier scored, even if he did miss one.

A schoolboy admirer of Le Tissier, Rickie considered it “a big deal” to get the No.7 shirt at St Mary’s.

And the way Rickie wore it was a very big deal indeed for Southampton’s fans. By the time he went to Brazil for the World Cup with England in the summer of 2014 he had realised a long-held ambition by becoming a Liverpool player for a £4m fee. The fact that Saints fans accepted his “dream” move with such grace was testimony to the respect he had earned in the five wonderful years he had spent on the south coast. His spell at Anfield was not a huge success, it was not really the place for a 32-year old with the Reds very much on the up and up and having to compete with Europe’s finest to get a starting place. He subsequently went to the Hawthorns and then to Cardiff but the hunger and fitness had gone and he called it a day in October 2017.