A tall, blond scheming inside forward who was a star of Coventry’s famous 1963 FA Cup run when, as a Third Division club, they reached the sixth round in a blaze of glory. Jimmy scored nine goals in six FA Cup games to add to his nine league goals and played some of the best football of his career but it was not sufficient to win promotion for the club. The concertinaed cup run had taken too much out of the players and City slipped to finish fourth.

During the close season Jimmy suffered a painful stomach muscle injury and when he recovered he couldn’t win his place back from Ernie Machin and played only nine more games in Sky Blue. In March 1964 manager Jimmy Hill sold him to Millwall for £4,500.

Jimmy Hill signed Jimmy on a free transfer from Reading, where he had a five-year career scoring 67 goals in over 220 games. Born at Greets Green in the Black Country he joined his local team West Brom and had six years at the Hawthorns but never quite made the first team. The Baggies were one of the top teams in the country in the mid 1950s and Jimmy had to move to Reading to make a name for himself.

The stay at Millwall was brief – he played less than a season before moving on to non-league football with first Hillingdon Borough and later Hastings United and Andover. He worked for an engineering company in Reading after hanging up his boots and later indulged his love of betting by becoming an on-course bookmaker and he could often be found at Oxford or Reading dog-tracks. Jimmy retired to Reading but came to the occasional game at Coventry before his death in 2022.