Local hero ~ Tom Lines explains how Ian Roper became a fans' favourite at Walsall despite his quiet demeanour off the pitch and limited talent on it

There are no interesting anecdotes featuring Ian Roper. No drunken mishaps, no punch-ups with team-mates, no hilarious incidents featuring fireworks, criminal damage or prostitutes. That he became such a well loved figure without doing anything other than turning up and playing football makes his status as a cult hero all the more remarkable.

Cult players are fighters, boozers, mavericks – blessed with preternatural talent and a finger hovering permanently above the self-destruct button. They are not shy, unassuming centre-halves from Nuneaton, who were once ostracised by their manager for failing to sign up to the club’s drinking culture.

As a defender, it is fair to say "Ropes" was not exactly in the Beckenbauer mould. Such was the random direction of the ball as it left his boot, a friend once described him as having "50p feet". He looked absolutely nothing like a footballer. This relatively recent picture apparently shows a gauche teenager arriving at a provincial IT company for two weeks’ work experience. With his loping gait and 6ft 3in frame he often resembled a Great Dane that had mistakenly wandered onto a greyhound track.

Asking fans about Roper’s best attributes produces a checklist of faint praise. He "did the simple things well", "never gave less than 100 per cent" and was "deceptively quick". He was also much, much better than he looked: a classically combative lower-league stopper, minus the Cro-Magnon mean streak.

Graduating from the youth team to sign professionally in May 1995, Roper had to wait another 18 months before making his first team debut and appeared sporadically over the next two years. But as Walsall improved, so did Ian Roper. He appeared 40 times during the unlikely promotion campaign of 1998-99 as Ray Graydon’s first season in management ended with Walsall pipping Manchester City to the Division Two runners-up spot.

Relegation and another promotion via the play-offs followed in successive seasons. When Walsall retained their place in the second tier – achieving their highest League finish since 1962 in the process – Roper was named as the club's player of the season. He beat higher profile candidates such as the goalkeeper Jimmy Walker and enigmatic Brazilian striker Junior, who took to celebrating goals by revealing a T-shirt bearing the glorious slogan "Jesus lives in Walsall".

Roper stayed at Walsall for another six years, never quite recapturing the form of that wonderful season yet never waning in the fans’ affection either. When he did move on he signed for Luton, becoming a cult figure at Kenilworth Road too as this rather touching YouTube tribute demonstrates.

On the surface his popularity seems straightforward. His shyness and humility off the pitch and his awkwardness on the field gave him an everyman appeal. Roper was the kind of player who allowed supporters to imagine how their own Walsall career might have panned out: short on skill, long on commitment.

His career also manages to mirror the club’s own yo-yoing between divisions and their brief, doomed flirtation with becoming an established second tier side. For one glorious season Ian Roper epitomised what Walsall had become. But more than that, he reminded us where we had come from and, inevitably, where we would return. Tom Lines

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