Life in 1950s Ireland was tough so Tony Byrne’s parents took the decision to move to London which is how he came to join Millwall as a 16-year-old. When he came to The Dell with Millwall’s Reserves in March 1964, he did a marking job on George O’Brien – well enough, he believes, to persuade Ted Bates to sign him, still only 18, that summer. After a season in waiting, he became the Reserves’ regular No.6 during the next two seasons, with just the one first-team outing, a few days before his 19th birthday, in the FA Cup (see scrapbook section). A broken leg in April 1966 held him back for another year until, in April 1967, he made his League debut in a 3-0 defeat at Old Trafford. Manchester United would come to occupy a special place in Byrne’s Southampton career,

as Terry Paine suggested a special assignment for him: he could man-mark George Best. He remembers this as a “marvelous” experience, helped by his being “as quick as I was.”

But horses for courses will often struggle, by definition, to carve themselves a regular niche and Byrne was no exception – although he played more often than most of the squad in 1969-70, mainly at left-back. He won the first of his 14 Republic of Ireland caps that season. In 1973-74, he played his last international and made his one and only complete appearance for Lawrie McMenemy, from whom he was soon “desperate to get away.” Fortunately for him, he had made quite an impression on Paine. So when come the summer, Terry moved to Hereford as John Sillett’s player-coach, he took Tony with him. When he picked a Saints XI, for his biography in 2008, Paine had the “under-rated” Byrne on his bench, reasoning that he wasn’t

“looking for his strength on the ball, but his strength off the ball: so quick and aggressive.”

Having missed only one game in his first season at Edgar Street, Tony pulled a calf muscle and made only a few more appearances for Hereford before moving down the leagues and into coaching.

But he soon quit the game to work in Hereford – first in a factory, making beer barrels, then in the building trade. In his sixties, he went part-time, gardening in a retirement home – a throwback to his summers in Southampton, when he was a green-keeper at Romsey Golf Club. He played golf to a handicap of one so it was no surprise when his son Sean became a professional golfer. Tony succumbed to cancer just a few months shy of his 70^th birthday. NB