Andy Ford continues his series, with Terry Paine next on the list.
Terry Paine, who turned 81 in March, is Southampton’s record appearance holder, playing in 713 league games, and over 800 in all competitions for the club, between 1956 and 1974.
He made one appearance for England during the 1966 World Cup Finals, the 2-0 group stage victory over Mexico, the last of his nineteen international caps. Only the eleven players in the Final received a medal, Paine being one of the four members of the squad that took part in the tournament but not in the Final, the others being Jimmy Greaves, John Connelly and Ian Callaghan.
A Football Association led campaign persuaded FIFA to award a medal to all the members of the squad, irrespective of whether they played or not, and Terry was presented with his medal in June 2009. However, he parted company with it, two years later, at auction, for £27,500, with Paine, one of many players in the England squad who sold their medals, saying at the time, “I’ll be sad to see it go but it has been sat in a vault doing nothing.”
Terry played six times against the Gills, across a period of over eighteen years, with the first of these being our visit to The Dell for a Division Three (South) match on the final day of August 1957. We lost 5-1, after Ron Saunders had given us the lead in the sixth minute, with Paine setting up the second goal and then scoring the fifth, from close range, eighteen minutes from time. He was also on the scoresheet in the return at Priestfield on the last Saturday of 1957, but this time it was only a consolation, the player netting, with almost the last kick of the game, in the second minute of time added on by the referee for stoppages, the Gills winning 2-1.
Paine didn’t face Gillingham again until 1974. He’d become player-coach at Hereford United in July that year and was in the Edgar Street outfit’s side for their trip to Kent, for a third-tier clash, on Saturday 12 October 1974. We lost 3-2, and the Evening Post report included, ‘It was the cultured skills of Hereford player-coach Terry Paine which proved decisive. Paine brought into play all the experience he gained in his 750 games for Southampton, many of them in the First Division, as he schemed Gillingham’s downfall from his deep-lying midfield role.’
Terry scored Hereford’s second goal that afternoon and he was back at Priestfield for an FA Cup tie the following month, but didn’t score in a 1-0 victory, a report stating, ‘Paine was never allowed to dominate, as he had done in the earlier encounter between the two sides.’
Terry’s other two appearances for Hereford against the Gills were both 1-1 draws at Edgar Street, in April and August 1975, and he didn’t score in either. The latter was played in a howling wind, with Ken Dyer’s report stating that Paine ‘belied his veteran classification with a display that was a real pleasure to watch.’
