To the very end, Jimmy Rimmer was a picture of self-effacement and always disinclined to locate himself at the centre of a football story.He was happy in his own company, content to enjoy a beer without others present in the corner of a pub in Swansea, the place he came to call home, and it amused to think that some of the regulars would observe of him: ‘That quiet fella in the corner used to be famous.’He was one of the outstanding goalkeepers of his era, named by Gordon Banks as the 20th best in the world – a judgement he took as a compliment, rather than wonder how the England legend managed to put so many others ahead of him – and had fate not conspired to thwart him, his football fame would actually have been far greater than it was.Rimmer, who has died at the age of 78, has the dubious distinction of being the only English player to win the European Cup with two different club without being on the pitch when either final finished. The first came early, when a role in Manchester United’s Youth Cup winning team of 1964 earned him a place among the club’s substitutes in the 1968 European Cup final at Wembley. Though the 20-year-old looked on as Sir Matt Busby’s side sweep away Benfica, with Alex Stepney nowhere near being dislodged, Rimmer would reflect on the privilege of being around George Best, Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and others.It was always enough for him that he had the memory of a United first team debut, a few months before the final, when Stepney was injured for an Easter Monday match against Fulham at Old Trafford. There was 64,000 people inside, another 10,000 locked outside and Rimmer did his job, making one save and handling a few crosses in a 3-0 win. Former Aston Villa and Man United goalkeeper Jimmy Rimmer has died aged 78 Rimmer famously had to come off through injury in Aston Villa’s 1982 European Cup final triumph over Bayern MunichBut after his football journey had taken him on loan to Swansea and then to Bertie Mee’s Arsenal, where he was a mainstay in the mid-1970s, European Cup glory beckoned once more, after his Aston Villa side reached the 1982 final against Bayern Munich. The game was five days away when he collided with Swansea’s Bob Latchford in a league game, crashing down onto his neck and finding himself in agony.The physios did what they could for him and generous quantities of cortisone were applied to his shoulder and neck on the night of the final, but nine minutes into the game, he knew it was a lost cause and signalled that he would be unable to play on. He sat in the Villa dressing room and wept, as Nigel Spink ran on in his place for what would be a career-defining role. Rimmer had previously missed just one match in five years for Villa.The many sports journalists who ventured to ask Rimmer had he regretted that decision to depart the scene were always cut short by him. ‘You can’t do that,’ he’d always say. ‘We got to the final as a team. I couldn’t be the Jimmy Rimmer people would expect me to be.’That ‘Jimmy Rimmer’ was a quite exceptional player, a graduate of United’s Busby school who took every word the old man instilled in him to heart. ‘He treated you like a man,’ Rimmer said of Sir Matt in later life. ‘You knew not to do silly things because if you did that with him, you were going upstairs for a chat in the office.’But it was Harry Gregg, the former Manchester United goalkeeper and reluctant hero of the Munich disaster who, as a goalkeeping coach, had imbued him with the wisdom which served him best. ‘Catch the ball. Get some shape in your hands. Cover your near post. They’re not so good at the near post these days.’ It was also Gregg who talked a 23-year-old Rimmer into a loan move at Fourth Division Swansea, then told Arsenal scout Gordon Clark to sign him in April 1974.Rimmer proved a fine successor to Bob Wilson, who retired at the end of that season and, once elevated to No1, missed only three Arsenal games in three years – a period in which he secured his solitary England cap, against Italy in 1976. Rimmer had Ray Clemence and Peter Shilton ahead of him in the order: more evidence of an absence of serendipity in his long football career.In a wonderful interview with Daily Mail Sport’s Matt Barlow two years ago, Rimmer delighted in telling against himself a story about his arrival as an unsophisticate at Arsenal in 1974. After his debut in a 1-0 win at Liverpool, he thought he was on the receiving end of a wind-up when offered prawn cocktail or smoked salmon on the bus home. ‘At United, the bus driver would go and get fish and chips, and now there’s two fellas asking me what starter I’d like, whether I want steak or chicken and red or white wine,’ he said. ‘That’s why they’re called the Arsenal. It’s nothing but the best and I’d come from Man United.’ The goalkeeper started his career at Manchester United after joining the club as just a boyHe’d make occasional mistakes, like any keeper, though it was perhaps the nature of the man that he tended to internalise them more than most. ‘I’d go into my own world when I made a mistake,’ he reflected. ‘I used to hold them in and think about them for too long. Harry Gregg would say, “Oh, you’re the only one who ever made a mistake, are you?” But you can’t go around telling people about all the great saves you made.’For all that, he was an adventurer, spending three years coaching goalkeepers in China, after finishing his playing days at Swansea, whom he managed twice as caretaker. He lived rent-free in a suite of the Shangri-La in Beijing and had only planned to go for three months but loved the culture there and respected it, which always said that was why he lasted there so long. Rimmer being Rimmer, he didn’t put it down to his technical capabilities.After suffering a heart attack which left him a coma for 11 days, 18 years ago, while living in Vancouver, he returned to South Wales to be closer to his son David, one of his three children. He followed Swansea City, was an occasional speaker in their matchday lounges and when extending a hand of friendship would apologise for no longer possessing him a firm grip, explaining that several artificial joints were the penalty for his career between the posts.Rimmer would not have had the game’s slings and arrows any other way. He always liked to reflect that he’d played for the biggest clubs in North West England, London the Midlands and Wales. ‘People call me a legend but I don’t see it like that,’ he said in later years. ‘I played with legends though – that’s for sure.’