Born in Sussex by the sea, Eric Webber came, as a child, to Hampshire, where his father was a gardener at Netley Hospital. His progress from the Hampshire League to The Dell took a while. Having failed to impress in a trial at Portsmouth, he was one of the local hopefuls sent by Jim Angell, in circumstances explained in Angell’s profile, to Norwich. Never having made the first team there, Eric followed manager Tom Parker to Southampton.Signed as an amateur at the start of the 1938-39 season, Eric had, by the end of it, turned pro and made his Second Division debut. He would have to wait another seven-and-a-half seasons for his next “official” appearance.

For the aborted three-match season of 1939-40, Eric was behind Dave Affleck and Tom Carnaby in the queue to play centre-half. But with the outbreak of war, both of those obstacles joined the police and Eric was suddenly the No.1 centre-half. The club’s competitive season would now consist of 38 matches in war-time Leagues and Cup. Eric was the only ever-present.But then came overseas postings with the RAF and, although he guested in the east Midlands, Eric hardly featured for the Saints again until the transitional season of 1945-46. During that season, centre-half Bill Dodgin became the manager and, when League football resumed in September 1946, Eric was the new centre-half. Apart from three months out injured,the following season, the No.5 shirt was now his, all the way until his last game in February 1951, which ended an unbroken run of 134 League games.

Yet Sid Cann had told the Board, when he became the manager in the middle of that run, that he needed a new centre-half.In October 1951, Eric moved to Third South Torquay, appearing, as a player-manager, in 149 League games, before he assumed the hot seat, full-time, in 1956. After 14 seasons at Plainmoor, he managed Poole Town, in the Southern League, until 1970. Whereupon, he quit football and took over the Manor House pub in Woolston, from which he retired in 1984.

Eric Webber, an old-fashioned stopper of a centre-half and a loyal club-man, was a passionate believer in the maximum wage. The concept of star-players was alien to him: football was a team-game, in which each man depended upon 10 others. His feudal faith was manifested in his disdain for the document that he kept with his scrap-book: a copy of Mr Justice Wilberforce’s judgment in the case of Eastham v Newcastle United. You’re unlikely to meet many ex-players with that particular item of memorabilia. But, then, you won’t meet many as fiercely egalitarian as Eric about the way the game should be run.

On the morning of 6 March 1948, the team was in Coventry for a Second Division match. When Eric received a telegram, advising him that his wife had given birth to a son, he announced to his team-mates that the boy would be named after whichever of them scored the Saints’ first goal. Augie Scott obliged with the only goal of the game. Eric reneged. He called his son Norman. Shortly before he died, Eric confessed to a club historian that he should really have named the boy Norman Scott Webber.