Having hardly missed a First Division game in 1959-60, as Leicester’s centre-half, Tony Knapp was riding high in 1960-61 when he was sidelined by a cartilage-injury. By the time he recovered, Ian King was installed at No.5 and there was no place for Tony when Leicester lost to Tottenham in the FA Cup Final. He was disappointed and “determined to move.” Among those ready to sign him were Liverpool and Southampton, both of the Second Division. Well, not that ready in the case of Liverpool, as Bill Shankly was hedging his bets:

Dundee United, who had refused him his first choice, Ron Yeats, might change their minds. Knapp recalls arriving at Anfield and being greeted by Shankly: “Oh! Hello Tony, what are you doing here? We’re just about to sign Ron Yeats.”

So Ted Bates spent a club-record £27,500 to acquire him – urgently needed, after John Page had slipped a disc in pre-season training – just in time for the 1961-62 kick-off.

Surprised to find it such a difference, “dropping down a division,” Tony was ever-present that season and the next. Indeed, he would make 103 consecutive appearances before injury kept him out. And he had taken over the captaincy, early in that run, from an incensed Terry Paine. There can be no doubting, then, that Bates was pleased with his buy. But those around Tony were not so sure.

He was very confident in his own ability, but it worried Cliff Huxford – accustomed to playing alongside a no-nonsense Page – when Tony “tried to take people on in the wrong areas.”

Goalkeeper Tony Godfrey missed Page for a different reason: Knapp could be nervous. Whereas Godfrey knew what to expect of Page, he sometimes couldn’t predict what Knapp might do next. This was especially a problem in the form of wayward back-passes, some of which resulted in own goals.

It was a subject of some mirth among their team-mates when Bates required Knapp to practise passing-back to Godfrey. But it was no laughing matter for the goalkeeper, who felt that he too often took the blame – and might be dropped – for the misunderstandings. If all of that appears to be disproportionately negative, it must be remembered that the journeyman Page, who’d missed only two Second Division games in 1960-61, had been valued for his dependability. As Ron Davies reflected, after Tommy Traynor and he had been summoned by Bates and asked to “cover for” Knapp, why should the full-backs have to look after a record-signing? There is, however, an alternative construction: that Knapp was ahead of his time. Brian Clifton, who would become a defensive wing-half at Grimsby, with a role of “almost sweeping”, would have liked to do so for Knapp, who “attacked the ball brilliantly.”

That combination of a centre-back who goes for nearly everything, while his partner covers him, has, of course, become a familiar feature of modern defending. However you analyse it,

Tony Knapp became a fixture, as Ted Bates rebuilt his 1960 promotion-side for the step-up to Division I in 1966, with the memorable 1963 Cup-run along the way.

Once back in Division I, where he never doubted he belonged, Tony missed only three games in 1966-67. So he was “very surprised” when Bates handed the incoming Jimmy Gabriel the No.5 shirt and he was on his way to Coventry. After two more seasons in the English game, with a stint in California, Tony turned to coaching and management, initially in England but then in Iceland, where he twice managed the national side. He has served 11 Norwegian clubs, from the top-flight to minor football in the area of Stavanger, where he lives. He retired from his last club, Lillesand, in 2012, at the age of 76. Tony Knapp stammered as a player, but when he fluently addressed the audience at the Dell Diamond launch in 1998, he volunteered that his impediment had vanished when he began to speak Norwegian. Indeed when he passed away in March 2023 he was still living in Norway, the country which had become his home.