Dick Neal adjusted well enough from colliery football to the Football League with Second Division Blackpool, although his appearances had tailed off by 1930, when Blackpool won promotion, and he hardly featured in Division I in 1930-31. Nor was he a regular at that level after joining First Division Derby, but he seemed to find his niche, back in Division II, with Southampton, amply rewarding the Supporters’ Club, who had come up with his transfer fee. Once the committee had agreed to fund the £500 fee, manager George Kay caught the midnight train north so keen was he to get his man.

Kay made the right decision. To say that Neal made the Saints’ outside-right position his own would be an under-statement: from the moment of his debut in February 1932, he missed only two of the next 101 League and Cup matches.

But then appendicitis struck and he was out for the first third of the 1934-35 season. He returned to play fairly regularly, occasionally on the other wing, but, come January 1937, he switched to inside-right – until, that is, the arrival, in March, of Tom Parker, as the new manager. Parker not only bought Wilf Mayer for Neal’s new position but began furiously to shuffle the rest of his forwards, requiring Dick to play in three positions in four games.

All of which explains why he moved on, the wrong side of 30, to Bristol City of the Third South.Having seldom featured as they narrowly missed promotion, he switched to the Third North, playing more regularly in the Accrington side that finished bottom as war loomed. Returning to Yorkshire, he played semi-pro for two colliery teams and worked in the mines throughout World War Two. After the War, he soon became the landlord of the Lordens Hotel in Dinnington, where his footballing career had begun. But finding himself unsuited to that life, he returned, via a stint with the Gas Board, to mining and remained in the industry until his 65th birthday. “Mac” Neal, Dick’s father, had played Midland League football, but Dick was one of three sons who played in the Football League: Arthur for Liverpool and Darlington; and Sid for Luton and Rotherham County. His brother-in-law was Middlesbrough’s Frederick Gibson, while his son Richard would win four England U-23 caps, in the course of a career with Lincoln, Birmingham and Middlesbrough.