As a 16 year-old apprentice-bricklayer, keeping goal for Basingstoke in the Hampshire League, Tony Godfrey was being pointed, by competing advisers, to two Southampton managers: Tom Parker in charge of Saints prior to WW2 and now in a second spell at Norwich, and Ted Bates, recently appointed at Southampton.

Championed by a Kingsclere relative of Alf Kirchen – who had joined Parker in his first stint at Norwich and who was now his coach – Tony signed amateur forms for the Canaries in January 1956. But his manager at Basingstoke, Stan Clements – a former Southampton team-mate of Bates – was urging him to join the Saints, which he did in May 1956. His part-time amateur contract was complicated.

He continued to turn out for Basingstoke in the Hampshire League – like Terry Paine with Winchester City and Wes Maughan with Sandown – rather than for CPC, for which so many of the 1956-57 Youth team played. But Charles Henwood, the owner of CPC, found Tony a job in his building department. The arrangement by which Henwood effectively “sponsored” that Youth team is explained in the profile of their trainer, Ernie Jones. Tony was not originally part of the side that reached the Youth Cup semi-final, but Brian Flood – a member of the Flood “dynasty” was badly injured and Tony took over at the quarter-final stage, to become everybody’s Man-of-the-Match when the lads won the second leg of the semi-final (lost 7-5 on aggregate) at Old Trafford.

By the time he made his first-team debut in December 1958, in the FA Cup at Loftus Road (see below), Tony was doing his National Service at RAMC, Crookham, where Bates always tried to “place” his temporary soldiers, as their working week enabled them to play on Saturdays – always supposing they were fit enough, after undergoing the Army’s unsuitable PT. In the Saints’ 1-0 defeat of QPR, Tony was, the Echo reckoned,

“confident, cool, alert and agile.”

He played in the next five games, all in the League, but was omitted for the Third Round tie v First Division Blackpool. It still rankles that Bates opted for the experience of John Christie. But, then, apart from when “one of the worst injuries” of his career obliged Bates to bring in the young Bob Charles,

so much of Tony’s time at Southampton was as second fiddle to an older ’keeper.

In the seven years from his debut to his departure, Tony played every season, without ever making the jersey his own. In only two seasons – 1961-62, when he was ever-present after Ron Reynolds’s opening-day injury; and 1963-64, when he again came in for Reynolds, after Ron’s career-ending injury at Portsmouth, did Tony play in the majority of matches. While Reynolds was getting injured, Godfrey was attending a wedding, having refused to play for the “A” team. That “protest”, as Tony himself puts it, against being dropped to the third XI, was symptomatic of his recurrent struggle to prove himself to a manager who brought in three veterans to play, in turn, ahead of him.

The signing of Campbell Forsyth in December 1965 was the last straw. Tony now had two spells at Aldershot, in the course of which he had three ever-present seasons and during the second of which the Shots were promoted to Division III. In between, he had a couple of seasons at Rochdale, under Dick Conner, who had been a Southampton team-mate and his Aldershot trainer.After which, he returned to the Hampshire League, in various permutations of playing and coaching. In 1985, at the age of 45, he turned out for Basingstoke, in an injury crisis, making him their oldest-ever player, just as he had been their youngest 30 years before.

By then, he had set up his own building business, from his home in Oakley, near Basingstoke.