Ron Saunders couldn’t have been more accurate when he described the signing of Peter Withe as the final piece in his Aston Villa jigsaw.

Within two years, the burly striker had more than repaid his £555,550 transfer fee by contributing 20 goals to our League Championship triumph and hitting the winner in the European Cup final.

But it would have been a very different story if our manager had been allowed to sign another striker just four months before Withe’s arrival from Newcastle United in July 1980. In March that year, Saunders offered £750,000 – for Mick Ferguson of Coventry City.

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Thankfully, the Villa board were not convinced, even though Ferguson had been knocking in a few goals for the Sky Blues, and the proposed transfer was blocked.

Our bank overdraft stood at over £830,000 and that signing would almost have almost doubled it at a time when our attendances were modest, to say the least. Even so, Saunders was given the go-ahead a month later to undertake negotiations with Coventry about Ferguson and Newcastle about Withe, and he clearly reached the conclusion that the latter option was a much better bet.

It was the first time since his appointment six years earlier that Ron didn’t get his own way and, ultimately, he must have been grateful for the directors’ refusal to sanction a deal for Ferguson. While Withe was an instant success at Villa Park, the Coventry striker ended up joining Everton for £280,000 in 1981 and his career went downhill from there, albeit hampered by injury problems.

Signing Withe wasn’t Villa’s only piece of good business that summer. In April, our goalkeeper Jimmy Rimmer made a formal request for a free transfer when his contract expired at the end of the season. Thankfully, he was persuaded to stay, and his saves were almost as crucial as Withe’s goals during those amazing first two seasons of the 1980s.

In view of our incredible success, Saunders’ sudden departure in February 1982 no doubt left our supporters in a state of shock, with many people surprised there was no attempt by the board to try and persuade him to stay. After all, the club were faced with the prospect of losing the manager who had guided us to the club’s first League Championship for 71 years and the European Cup quarter finals.

It was certainly a surreal situation, although the signs were there that all was not well between the manager and the board, who were not impressed that had started to involve himself with running of the club, rather than just the team. He had begun to meddle in anything from catering to programme sales and complained about stadium manager Terry Rutter spending money on the maintenance of Villa Park.

At a board meeting on 2nd February, he even recommended selling Tony Morley and Gary Shaw to fund the purchase of new players. His proposal was rejected by the board, who felt he should consider selling less important players. It was at the same meeting that the directors gave him three years’ notice on his three-year rollover contract. As things stood, if they had sacked him at any point, he would have been entitled to a pay-off equivalent to three years’ salary – a great deal for him, but obviously not for the club.

A week later, Ron called me at home and asked me to go to his house because he had something important to tell me. When I got there, he told me he was leaving, and handed me his resignation letter. Then he asked me to phone chairman Ron Bendall to impart the news. I would have preferred to make that call from home, but Ron insisted that I do it there and then because he wanted to know the chairman’s reaction.

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Bendall couldn’t have cared less. Although we were through to the European Cup quarter-finals, our league form was poor. We were 15th in the table and had just lost 4-1 to Manchester United. In effect, Bendall had just been handed a Get Out of Jail Free card. If Ron was resigning, no pay-off was necessary, let alone three years’ worth.

When I put the phone down, Ron asked what the chairman said. Hands up, I lied. “Well,” I said. “He was obviously shocked and upset.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, but I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of the man who had encouraged me to apply for the job of club secretary three years earlier.

We will never know if Ron’s resignation letter was a bluff. If it was, it backfired spectacularly. His reputation ensured that within a week he was back in employment – as manager of our old rivals from across the city – but he never again enjoyed the dizzy heights he had scaled at Villa Park. It was just a pity that things got so messy when he left us.

He issued a writ against the club, indicating that interference from the board had prevented him from doing his job – and the board, in turn, said that if he joined Birmingham City they would issue a writ against him for breaking his contract. Eventually, a deal was struck and no court proceedings were necessary. The club’s solicitors agreed that in consideration of Ron returning his car in good condition, we would pay him £5,000.