He has always been like this, at all of his clubs. At Manchester City, Given recalled how his supposed rival for a place used to greet him at halftime with a kind word, a confidence boost. “He’d just say ‘great save,’ or tell you how well you’d played,” Given said. “Just small things that helped.”

Taylor also became known as the club’s “entertainments manager,” as Given puts it, a role he has continued at Southampton in some form. Though he is well aware that he is not employed “just to have banter,” he sees part of his responsibility as pastoral.

“I have been brought here to help with the dynamic,” he said. “To keep things happy and bubbly, to try and be a good influence.”

His job, though, is to be a goalkeeper. “They wouldn’t have me here if I couldn’t play in goal,” he said. He takes his work extremely seriously. Taylor said that his focus during training is on “making more saves” than his rivals, Forster and McCarthy. Afterward, he regularly stays out with the club’s strikers, helping them with extra shooting practice. “I enjoy that competitive side of them trying to beat me,” he said. “I don’t want them to beat me.”

Part of that is down to experience. He learned, at Arsenal, that sometimes teams do need three goalkeepers: that is why he still has a Premier League winner’s medal in his father-in-law’s safe. He found out at Villa, too, that switching off is not an option. “We had a game against Manchester City,” he remembered. “Sorensen was injured in the warm-up. I’d half switched off by then, and I had a stinker.”

He points out, too, that Paulo Gazzaniga, Tottenham’s third-choice goalkeeper, was drafted in for a game earlier this season. “If you don’t prepare properly, you’ll only make yourself look stupid,” he said.