FROM Southampton to Newcastle United, and from Celtic to Aston Villa, Terry Gennoe has played and worked for some of Britain’s biggest clubs during a football career that, 43 years after it begun, is just beginning to wind down.

None of those clubs, however, can match his affection for Blackburn Rovers.

In 16 years of stellar service at Ewood Park he proved to be a goalkeeper of outstanding quality and then, after he hung up his gloves, a goalkeeper coach of some distinction.

During his time with Rovers, Gennoe witnessed firsthand the club’s dramatic transformation from one which had to sell a player to pay an electricity bill, to one which could afford to splash out a world-record transfer fee for a goalkeeper, in Tim Flowers.

Gennoe was present during the club’s heartbreaking play-off near-misses of the late 1980s and during its remarkable rise to the summit of English football in the mid 1990s.

Gennoe, alongside the likes of Roger Jones, Flowers and Brad Friedel, will go down as one of the greatest goalkeepers in the club’s history.

He insists, however, the pleasure was all his.

“I’m very proud to have played and worked for Blackburn,” said Gennoe, who made 289 League appearances for Rovers, which remains a club record for a goalkeeper, after his move from Southampton in August 1981.

“And I’m very proud to have played with some fantastic players and worked with some fantastic people.

“There was always such a fantastic team spirit. For example at the end of my first season the then chairman Bill Fox sat us all down in the changing room and said, ‘listen lads, I can’t afford to give anybody a rise, so if any of you want to get up and leave this club now, then you can do it’. But not one player left. That’s what it was like. The team spirit was fantastic.

“I remember when we had to sell a player to pay the electricity bill because we couldn’t put on a floodlit game. The player we sold was Kevin Stonehouse, to Huddersfield Town, for about £30,000.

“But we just got on with it because we had such respect for the manager, Bob Saxton. He did a fantastic job because he didn’t have anything to work with whatsoever.

“He understood the players and he got really close to them. Times were different then. He’d play cards with us and have cans of beer with us on the way back from away games.

“Sometimes we lost and sometimes we won but it was always a positive mood. Even if we’d lost, we’d always get something out of it, and put things right the next time.

“So I was absolutely heartbroken for Bob when he was sacked.

“Then we brought Don Mackay in. He understood my position because he’d been a goalkeeper himself.

“You couldn’t get a word in edgeways with Don. I remember one training session, when we went through the whole of the set-plays, I swear we were out there for three hours.

“But he was passionate and he did take the club very close.”

The closest, of course, being the two-legged play-off final defeat to Crystal Palace in 1989.

“That was heartbreaking,” said Gennoe. “We were 3-1 up from the first leg at Ewood and Ian Miller had a great chance early on in the second leg. If he would have put that away it would have been 4-1 and game over.

“The referee that night (George Courtney) had an horrendous game.

“When we were losing 1-0 he gave a penalty to Palace. I still don’t know how he gave it. Mark Atkins was running out of the box and a Crystal Palace player (Eddie McGoldrick) just collided with him and the referee gave a penalty even though the ball was nowhere near them. It was an horrendous decision.

“That made it 2-0, they got the third in extra-time, and I can just remember their fans being on the pitch, stood around me in the penalty box, and the referee allowing the game to go on. And that was the reason why, or one of the reasons why, it was decided the final would be a one-off game at Wembley.

“It was very hard to swallow as that way my last chance to get back to the top flight.”

Rovers, by then under the command of Kenny Dalglish and backed by Jack Walker’s millions, did get to the top flight three years later, when they famously beat Leicester City 1-0 at Wembley.

By that stage Gennoe’s playing career was effectively over but there was not a hint of envy that glorious May afternoon in 1992.

“Not at all, I was there and I was so happy for the club,” said Gennoe, whose final appearance for Rovers came at the age of 37, on the opening day of the 1990-91 season, which made him the oldest man to keep goal for the club.

“It was the start of a remarkable turnaround for the club.”

It was a turnaround Gennoe continued to be very much part of after he announced his retirement at the end of the 1991-92 season.

He took over as Rovers’ goalkeeper coach, working with Bobby Mimms and £2.4m capture Flowers, as well as a young Shay Given, and was part of the backroom team behind the club’s incredible 1995 Premiership title triumph.

“I’ll tell you how the coaching came about,” said Gennoe, a qualified PE teacher, who combined his part-time role as Rovers’ goalkeeper coach with that of the club’s education officer, a position in which he pioneered the successful ‘Learning Through Football’ programme.

“At the end of my first season at Blackburn I went up to Bobby Saxton and said, ‘Bob, I can’t go on another season like this, when I’m warming up with the outfield players, doing possession and joining in. I’m not doing any goalkeeping and I want to get better’. And Bob said, ‘we can’t afford a goalkeeper coach, so if you want to put on a session, you’ll have to do it’.

“So that’s what I did. I used to take the group of goalkeepers, design the session, set it up, and it all went from there.”

In search of a full-time coaching position, Gennoe left Rovers in 1997 and went on to work with Dalglish again, at Newcastle and then at Celtic, before he returned to Newcastle for a second spell, where he served under future Rovers boss  Sam Allardyce.

Gennoe retired to Spain after leaving St James Park for the second time only to be lured back to England, on the insistence of his protégé Given, in 2011 after the goalkeeper coach position came up at Aston Villa.

Gennoe, now 62, remained at Villa Park until February this year and, after a lifetime of moving around, he is now ready to put down some roots, possibly in his native Shropshire.

But with a wife, Susie, from Blackburn, and two of his sons Rovers supporters, a certain club will never be far from his heart and mind.

“Blackburn are still the first result I look for,” said Gennoe, who made 334 appearances in total for Rovers.

“I’m very proud to have played for Blackburn, let alone the number of games I played.

“The fans were always very supportive of me. It was such a great feeling to go out there at Ewood knowing you had the support of the fans.”