Saints legend Ron Davies: Does Rooney play for Chelsea? (From Daily Echo)

Saints legend Ron Davies: Does Rooney play for Chelsea?

7:42am Friday 6th October 2006 in Sport

IT IS getting on for ten years since Ron Davies has given an interview and five years since he has talked about football.

It shows.

"So what about this Wayne Rooney," he says. "I saw something about him on the news a few weeks ago and I'd never heard of him. Who's he? Does he play for Chelsea?

"And what's happening at Southampton? Where are they nowadays?"

Many ex-players have difficulty leaving the game behind. Like addicts, they find it impossible to look away, even though each reminder of past glories may cause a certain pain.

The sight of comparatively average players becoming financially secure must be like having sand-paper scraped across those wounds.

Either Ron Davies couldn't give a stuff, or he has decided that the best therapy is one of complete withdrawal.

How else could one of Britain's finest ever strikers have not heard of the star player at the most famous club in the world?

Still, Wayne Rooney probably doesn't know who Ron Davies is either.

Yet it is Davies, not Rooney, who has been twice top-scorer in English football's top division.

What's more, his tally of 37 league goals in the 1966/67 season has not been bettered by anyone - not Rush, Dalglish, Keegan, Lineker, Cole, Shearer, Henry or Van Nistelrooy - in the 39 seasons since.

Regular visitors to The Dell are convinced that he could head a football better than anyone who ever lived.

Yet while Rooney enjoys an estimated basic income of £60,000 a week before sponsorship deals and endorsements, Davies is short of money and in poor health.

He is 64 and lives in a mobile residential vehicle (an RV) on a site in New Mexico.

He feels the game probably owes him something, but insists that he is not bitter. "Southampton gave me a chance and I think I repaid them," he says, "it was a wonderful life, but when it's over, it's over and you have to move on.

"I was loyal to Southampton, I gave it my best and suddenly you are out."

Tracking Ron Davies down and persuading him to give an interview was a somewhat bizarre experience.

As you might expect of a former footballer who appears uncertain which division his former clubs now play in, he is cut off from the English game.

Davies has not been back to Southampton since 1998, when he was coaching football in Florida.

On that occasion he returned with his wife Chris for a dinner held in honour of his former manager Ted Bates.

Full story in today's Daily Echo