Alf Milward was a winner. Having left home-town football for First Division Everton, he won a League championship medal with them in 1890-91 – the season in which he made the first of his four appearances for England – and twice picked up FA Cup runners-up medals. He then joined newly-formed New Brighton Tower, who immediately won the Lancashire League and were elected to the Football League’s Division II. And he was a goal-scoring winger, with a goals-per-game ratio that would have been the envy of many a centre-forward. 

This winning winger certainly lived up to his reputation in his two seasons at Southern League Southampton. In the first – 1899-1900 – he was ever-present in League and Cup. He scored a remarkable 23 goals in 28 Southern League appearances – more than the aggregate (18 in 38 games) achieved by the Jack Farrell and Roddy McLeod, the main contenders for the centre-forward position.

And he launched the Saints’ run to their first FA Cup Final with two of the goals that saw off Everton, no less. And all of this while he was bringing in team-mates – when not guilty of over-elaboration – with his elegant distribution. His team-mate at inside-left, the following season, was Edgar Chadwick, his former Everton partner.

Chadwick narrowly outscored him but their combined haul of 26 goals was almost half of the side’s total as they won the Southern League for the fourth time. Whereupon, Alf went to and fro for a while, between Southern League football – with New Brompton and Reading – and local fare with Southampton Cambridge. In the course of all this going back and forth, he became the landlord at the Diamond Jubilee. Then, in 1908, he became a referee for the Southampton FA. In 1939 he described himself as a painter and director and he was living in Arthur Rd, a stone’s throw from The Dell.