David Peach has several good reasons to reflect on his football career. Lawrie McMenemy’s first ever signing, he was, according to Saints new manager the best player in the Fourth Division. Secondly he is one of only two players – the other is Nick Holmes – to have featured in two Wembley Finals for Saints, scoring in one (see below).

Thirdly in 1979 he became not only Saints’ highest scoring full-back but the Football League’s too. Finally when later turning out for Orient he became the only player at that time to have played on every ground in the Football League. There were other successes too, eight England U21 caps and a call-up to the senior squad that toured South America in 1977 (he unluckily did not get a game), an impressive penalty record (24 out of 26) that was only later emulated by Matt Le Tissier and Rickie Lambert.

Unless you count being a ball boy at Wembley when England won the World Cup v West Germany in 1966, it had all started at Gillingham where, as a youngster, David had originally been a left-winger but when John Bond arrived as a coach he selected him at full-back for a match against Bristol City and so accomplished was his performance a professional contract was offered the next day. He certainly had all the assets of a top class full-back and must be regarded as one of the best wide defenders ever on Saints’ books.

Leaving Southampton, a £150,000 transfer to Swindon did not work out and, after the hitherto mentioned spell at Orient, David decided, aged 33 it was time – as he put it – for “a real job”. After being “attached”, as he again put it, to a fish business in Lymington which floundered, he started working as a labourer on building sites simultaneously acquiring the skills necessary to move into site management. He subsequently became assistant site manager for A&B Homes in Southampton and then a site manager with Miller Homes. He lives in Milford-on-Sea.