Cameroon-born Vincent Pericard moved with his mother, as an infant, to St Etienne in France. His teenage progress with the local club was such that he was snapped up by Juventus. “I wasn’t going to turn them down,” he says, but after just one game, in the Champions League against Arsenal, he was soon allowed to leave for Harry Redknapp’s Portsmouth. Having been fairly regular in their Championship-winning side of 2002-03, he would hardly start for Pompey in the Premiership, after year out with a cruciate ligament-injury. He eventually moved, after a couple of loans, to Championship Stoke City. He found it hard to adapt to Stoke’s style. With some of the fans giving him a hard time, Vincent “didn’t want the ball,” he recalls, and “didn’t want to play.” He was in trouble off the pitch, too. Caught speeding, he ingenuously claimed that somebody else had been driving and served five weeks of a four-month sentence for perverting the course of justice.

Nigel Pearson then brought the powerfully-built forward to St Mary’s on loan, but Vincent started only one Championship game. He went on to have his happiest spell in English football at Carlisle – although he managed to miss out on the 2010 JPT Final v Southampton, by moving to Swindon shortly before. But he did help to knock the Saints out of that competition, the following season, with two goals in Swindon’s 3-0 win.

He retired from the game while still in his 20s. One of his reasons was depression, brought on by his inability to acclimatise to living in England. In partnership with Leon McKenzie, the former Norwich City player, he set up Elite Welfare Management, an operation that has become his “passion”. It was dedicated to helping players, particularly from overseas, to manage their off-field lives. In January 2015 he briefly signed as cover for Moneyfields FC in the Wessex Premier League (9^th tier) while studying Business Studies at Portsmouth University. After one game v Folland Sports FC, he had this to say “When I was talking to them I made it clear that I hadn’t played any football or done much exercise for three years, so they shouldn’t expect any miracles, obviously playing football when you haven’t done anything is very, very hard but I was pleased with my contribution. My instructions were clear – hold the ball up and be strong up front.”