Speak to any Southampton team-mate of Ron Davies and you’ll be sure to receive accolades – perhaps especially from the wingers who supplied the crosses – as to his heading ability. Terry Paine rated him

“the best I’ve ever seen in the air.”

  Even Paine, a most accurate crosser of the ball – as Davies so gratefully acknowledges – valued Ron’s exceptional agility, as this allowed Terry to “lay the ball into areas… You didn’t have to pick him up.” 

John Sydenham, whose crossing was less precise, had even more cause to appreciate how Ron could turn wayward crosses “into good ones”, making him

“the greatest header of the ball The Dell’s ever seen”.

Bill Lambton, Ron’s manager at Chester, had had him jumping over hurdles wearing army boots. As Ron explained, in Jeremy Wilson’s Cult Heroes, that was “bloody hard, but when I took those boots off, I felt I could jump over the moon.”  The oddity about the technique he learned at Chester and demonstrated so stunningly at The Dell is that it was not apparent to his Southampton opponents when he played against them for his third club, Norwich. Paine had no recall of his being anything special, while right-half Ken Wimshurst could remember him dropping so deep that he found himself marking him. As Ted Bates sought a new striker for 1966-67, Southampton’s inaugural season in Division I, he jibbed at the £80,000 asking price for Chelsea’s England international, Bobby Tambling, and instead bought Davies – capped five times for Wales, but with no top-flight experience – for £55,000. Bates told the Echo that Ron was

“particularly good in the air”.

Paine credits the manager for “a stroke of genius” in spotting what the players had missed, although Ron would not head a First Division goal until the seventh game of the season. He scored 43 times that season – the 37 in the League making him the top-scorer across all divisions. The fact that 23 of the goals came from a foot justifies Ron’s concern that he should not be talked about for his heading alone: there was more to his game than that; he could do it on the deck and had what it took to lead the line.

Indeed, so keen was he to drop back and orchestrate matters that Bates had to urge him forward: his main job was to score goals.

He topped the First Division charts again – jointly with George Best – in 1967-68 and, by the end of a third successful season, his tally was 85 goals in 119 games.

He tailed off a little in his fourth season, 1969-70, although his goals, on an August afternoon at Old Trafford, will be recalled with special affection by those Saints fans who were there or who have caught up with it on video.

Ron was credited with all of his side’s goals, the first three of them headers from Sydenham’s crosses, in their 4-1 win.

But the footage clearly shows Frank Saul pushing United’s Franny Burns in the back, so that he knocks one of Ron’s three headers into his own net. There was no “Dubious Goals” panel, however, to deny Ron his third four-goal haul for the Saints. It would be his last, as Mick Channon took over as the main scorer. Channon has joined in the tributes to Ron’s prowess in the air, but Davies’s chances of heading in crosses were from now on limited by the need to feed Channon, the “man on the run”. If Paine wasn’t laying an early ball into Mick’s stride, then Davies would often need to be the target-man, flicking Mick through.

This wasn’t to Ron’s liking, but he battled on, winning another 23 caps for Wales and drawing publishable caricatures of his team-mates and himself (see scrapbook section). All in all, he gave his prime years to Southampton. He had told the People, in his first Dell season, that he’d “jump over the moon to join a top first Division club.” Decoded, that meant Manchester United. Ron would have joined them “at a heartbeat”, but didn’t know, until Matt Busby told him, after his Old Trafford spree, that Ted Bates had declined all offers.

United would eventually get their man in 1974, but only after he’d played 59 times for Portsmouth. By now 32, Ron had taken too many batterings from defenders unable to cope with his mastery of the airways and never started for United, having to be content to come off the bench eight times. After three Third Division outings for Millwall, he headed for the USA, where he eventually settled. He was still coaching kids near Orlando in his late fifties – individuals only, as he couldn’t abide by arguing with parents about team-selections. Having attended the 1998 celebrations of Ted Bates’s first 60 seasons with the Saints, Ron and Chris, his American partner, returned to Florida. But they soon moved to New Mexico, where they lived in a mobile residential vehicle in Albuquerque. Ron was now approaching 65 but, with bills to pay, was working on construction sites, despite serious wear and tear to both hips. With American health care seemingly unable to help, a group of Saints’ fans launched a hugely successful “Give-it-to-Ron” appeal to raise funds for his medical bills.

Ron underwent two successful hip replacements, with more Federal aid than had been anticipated, and was looking to the future, with the financial support of the appeal fund, when Chris died, after a short illness, in 2009. Ron now became something of a recluse, declining invitations to events organised by former team-mates or the club historians. A couple of Saints fans based in North America kept in touch with him. They had been sending conflicting bulletins on his health when Ron died on the eve of his 71^st birthday.