Having come through colliery football, Frank Matthews failed to make it in a trial at First Division Sheffield United and spent the next five seasons with three Second Division clubs, in turn. Unable to get a start at the first of them, Blackpool, he made a reasonable fist of his two years with Barnsley – to the extent that his move to Southampton would prove to be something of a set-back.

Once he broke into the side, half-way through his first season, scoring on his home debut, he was pretty regular at inside-left for the Saints.

He would be one of the losers, however, of the major rebuilding programme undertaken by manager Arthur Chadwick in the summer of 1926 and, after only three more appearances, dropped down a division – first to Chesterfield, where his former Southampton team-mate, Alec Campbell, had recently become manager, and then, via a second stint at Usworth Colliery, to Carlisle.

Those moves didn’t work and he returned to the north-east coalfields, to resume his job as a miner and to play some more colliery football for a while. According to the registration exercise carried out by the government as WW2 loomed he had become a hand cutter in a West Hartlepool timber field.