South African born, Frank Osborne moved to Aldershot, as a 14 year-old, in 1911 and soon joined the RAMC. The First World War, during which he served with the 2/7th Ambulance Brigade, surely helped to delay his introduction to League football until November 1921, when he was 25. He soon made up for it at Second Division Fulham, where he took less than a year to be capped by his adoptive country, when he became the first Fulham player to win an England cap.

Alternating in his four international appearances between outside-right and centre-forward, he crowned his international career, in May 1926, with a hat-trick against Belgium in Antwerp. He was by then with First Division Tottenham. He remained with Spurs, following their relegation in 1928, then, in 1931, he moved, within Division II, to Southampton. Having spent £450 to acquire a player nearing 35 and placed him on top-wages – £8 in the winter and £6 in the summer – the Southampton management hardly used him in the first six months of 1931-32.

At the end of March, however, the ageing Osborne was brought in at inside-right, alongside the young Ted Drake, to start an undefeated run that lifted the Saints clear of the danger-zone. Even so, his exorbitant wages obliged the cash-strapped club to place him on the transfer list in that summer of 1932. There were no takers and Frank whiled away the next season in the Reserves, with but five games in the first team.

Whereupon, he retired to London, to become a sales representative with Deans Blinds. Two years later, he returned to Craven Cottage – as a director. In 1948, when Fulham’s manager, Jack Peart, died, Southampton’s Bill Dodgin was invited to replace him. He declined and Osborne assumed the role. He immediately took Fulham to promotion from Division II in 1949 – at the last gasp, at the Saints’ expense – whereupon Dodgin, burdened by excessive “petticoat control” at The Dell, now agreed to take over at Fulham, where Osborne, moving upstairs as his general-manager, would be a “boss”, as he saw it, who had played the game. It didn’t work out that way: Charlie Mitten, Fulham’s outside-left of that era, reckoned that Dodgin was Osborne’s “stooge”. The proof of that pudding, perhaps, is that Osborne long outlasted Dodgin, replacing him as manager in 1953 for a couple of years and then continuing, as general-manager/secretary-manager, until his retirement from the Cottage in 1964. Two of Frank Osborne’s brothers played League football. Harold had just the one appearance with Norwich City, but Reg did enough at Leicester to win an England cap, at left-back, in 1927.