A few days after he scored the winner for Grimsby against Brentford on 1 May 2004, Isaiah Rankin received a text. “I want you,” it read.

Without context, he didn’t know how to react. It had to be a prank of some kind, he thought.

Once the season was complete, the mysterious messenger revealed himself. Perhaps he should have guessed – it was Bees boss Martin Allen, and one of his unorthodox methods.

Rankin – who came through the ranks at Arsenal before being sold to Bradford for in excess of £1 million in August 1998 – subsequently opted not to sign the contract extension the Mariners had tabled.

He had moved up north at 20 and, six years later, with a young family, moving closer to friends, family and home comforts in London was important.

A two-year deal was attractive, too. As was the prospect of working with Allen.

“In that game, I got a taste of watching Martin and Adrian Whitbread showing their passion on the side,” he recalls.

“I was just there laughing, smiling, thinking it was funny.

“When I got to meet him, I started to get to know him and understood how he ticked and how he was around the place. He knew how to motivate a team as well as the individual - and get the best out of the individual.

“People just see him as this old school guy, but there was a method to his management. If you sat him down one-on-one or around family, he's completely different.

“At the start of both of my two seasons at the club, we had a barbecue at the training ground for players and families, which brought it all together straight away. The group was really close and the foundations were laid from pre-season.”

Often paired with Deon Burton in attack, Rankin played all bar five games in League One during the 2004/05 season, with 10 goals and five assists in all competitions.

It was “one of the settled seasons”, as he calls it. “Whether I played as a centre-forward or out wide, I really enjoyed it.”

One of his most memorable moments came during the 2-2 draw with Southampton at St Mary’s Stadium in the FA Cup fifth round in February 2005, before which Allen had famously swam in the Solent.

“He would try and take the pressure off the boys and do something funny like that!” Rankin recalls.

“In the meeting beforehand Martin said, ‘We are going to win here’. All the boys looked around at each other.

“At the start of the game, we were relaxed and confident, but not overconfident. Then we ended up going 2-0 down. We thought, hang on a minute, this wasn’t in the script!

“But then once we got one before half-time, where I scored, you just saw the confidence come back into the group and I thought we were unlucky not to eventually to go on to win that game. Unfortunately, we ended up losing the replay back at Griffin Park.”

Targets in the league were not laid out quite as explicitly as the one before the Saints game. This was a team that had only just survived relegation the season prior, of course.

Allen would likely not have allowed his group to get ahead of its station, even though something was clearly building.

“The message was, with a wink, we want to stay up. But we had already achieved the points total by Christmas and then the aim changed. Then we said play-offs. As it came down to it, we were always in the top four, but it just wasn't to be that year.

“Having a small squad takes its toll, but it was gutting as I think we were the best team in the play-offs.

“We could have maybe brought in – though I don't know because of the financial situation - a few more loan players, but it wasn't to be, but it was a fantastic season and we were unlucky to lose out to Sheffield Wednesday, who eventually went up.”

Allen hung a bike on the wall at the training ground at the start of the 2005/06 season.

“He said to us, ‘What happens when you fall off your bike? You get back on the bike and go again. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves’. That was his message.

“The majority of the boys were still there, with a few changes. It was just a case of passing on the same message to the new players that came in.

"As soon as they came in, they knew we weren’t there to just be in the league or just avoid relegation. The standards were set and we were going to push on again.”

There was more competition for places in attack, with DJ Campbell joining the club and Lloyd Owusu returning, but Rankin was still a regular and scored seven league goals – nine in all competitions.

That, along with Allen’s constant – and no doubt clunky - visual reminder, helped Brentford reach the play-offs for a second year running.

But, for a second straight year, even a place in the final escaped them, by way of defeat to Swansea.

“That was harder to take,” Rankin says.

“The first leg, I thought we were okay, then second leg, we didn't turn up. Swansea with Lee Trundle, Leon Knight, Garry Monk were a good team, but I thought we didn't turn up.

“We didn't do ourselves justice on the day and that made it harder to take than the one before, as that one had been unexpected.

“100 per cent we should have done it. With the squad we had, the players we had, we should have done it.

“But you don't win games on paper, do you? We had to go out there and do it. Maybe you've got experience, but then some of the players, when it comes down to it, didn't have enough experience in those type of games. We just came unstuck. We just fell short.”

The core of the squad was dismantled shortly after that.

Jay Tabb, Michael Turner and Sam Sodje were sold. Rankin was released, along with Michael Dobson, Marcus Gayle, Eddie Hutchinson and Ricky Newman.

“There were no talks of staying; we needed to get up before the talks started, really,” he says.

“Once the manager goes and the core of the team goes, it's the end of the project.

“I was gutted; I wanted to stay. I left it as long as possible to see if something was on the table, but nothing came about and then I had to move on.

“But I left on good terms and with fond memories. It's one of the clubs where I thoroughly enjoyed my football and felt part of a successful team, even though we didn't get promoted.”

Rankin returned to Grimsby that summer and played on for another eight years, later pulling on the colours of Macclesfield, Stevenage, Crawley, Forest Green, Ashford Town (Middlesex) and Hendon.

Shortly after retiring in 2014, he began working at a private football academy, UFCA (Ultimate Football Coaching Academy), based in Leeds. He is still there, over a decade on, now as academy manager.

“I love it,” he adds. “Being on the coaching pitch, helping boys, passing on my experiences of getting back into it, helping them during games.

“We've been very successful getting boys back into clubs or pushing them on to academies. There’s a boy at Accrington called Tyler Walton, George Pratt at Blackburn, two have gone into Sheffield Wednesday, two have gone into Barnsley, we’ve got boys at Leeds.

“I've had offers to go into professional academy roles, but I enjoy the freedom of what I do now. There might come a time where I might jump in, dip my toe in, and go from there, but right now, this is the next best thing.”