JOHNNY HAYNES, who has died at the age of 71, became the first British footballer to be paid £100 a week. The club who paid him was certainly not one of the dominant ones, but he remained remarkably loyal throughout his long career to Fulham.

There it was that the comedian Tommy Trinder, then the chairman, made him a £100-a-week player a few months after the maximum wage had been abolished after a bitter fight between the players, led by Haynes’s colleague Jimmy Hill and the Football League.

AC Milan wanted him; AS Roma sent over a wily emissary, who actually visited me to discover whether there was any prospect of bringing Haynes to Rome. But Haynes, who at that time was running a bookmaking business with another Fulham colleague, the Scot Jimmy Bowie, remained at Craven Cottage.

He was something of a ‘wunderkind’, famous thanks to television and his own precocious talent at the age of 15. Not much football was shown on television then, but England’s schoolboy internationals at Wembley were an exception that proved the rule. So it was in the spring of 1950 that the then tiny Haynes stole the show against Scotland. Small, so much so that there were fears he might never grow big enough for league football, but supremely competent and confident, he was far and away the most impressive player on the field.

Many clubs then longed to sign him but, somewhat surprisingly, it would be Fulham whom he chose and where he stayed for 18 years.

The more surprisingly as, born in Edmonton on the doorstep of Tottenham Hotspur, he was known to be an Arsenal fan, the walls of his room plastered with pictures of Arsenal players.

He made his debut for Fulham in the 1952-53 season, playing 18 matches, scoring two goals. The next season, however, he missed only a single league game, and scored an impressive 16 times. This would be easily surpassed in 1958-59 when, in 34 league games, he got no fewer than 26 goals. Altogether, in 594 matches for Fulham in the league, he scored 148 times, while for England he gained 56 caps and scored 18 times. He would eventually grow to 5ft 10in.

Full in the thighs, he had, when he chose to use it, a fierce left-footed shot, never more strikingly in evidence than when, in October 1958, a few months after his disappointment at England’s performance in the World Cup in Sweden, he scored three out of five goals against the Soviet Union at Wembley.

This was some small consolation for the fact that in that previous World Cup England had been eliminated by the Soviets, drawing 2-2 with them in Gothenburg in their opening game, but losing 1-0 there in the eventual play-off.

Haynes certainly was not at his best, but there were, you might say, extenuating circumstances. He had blistered feet, and he and Fulham had been involved in a tense, exhausting bid for promotion to the first division. The club, despite Haynes’ talents, would oscillate between those two divisions.

They would go down again in 1968 and even descend the season after that to the third division.

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Haynes won the first of his England caps against Northern Ireland in Belfast on October 2, 1954. The previous spring, one had met him for the first time attired in RAF uniform in Bologna, a reserve for the first ever England Under-23 team, beaten 3-0 by the Italians. But a year later, at Stamford Bridge, with Haynes in devastating form, the England Under-23 side thrashed the Italians 5-1.