Former Aston Villa star Alan Wright is the new manager of Southport FC. From a highly competitive short list Wright has proven to the Port Board that he is the right man to power the Port forward.

What can one say about Arthur Peat? To those of us lucky enough to have been around in the 1960s when the fortunes of Southport Football club took a sudden and entirely unexpected turn for the better - the better, in fact, bordering on the miraculous - there is little more that can be said; to those who have come to the club later one can only trust that ones words will not be taken with a pinch of salt, the distance lends enchantment syndrome.

Things were not always better in those far off days. Indeed things in the late 1950s at Haig Avenue had scarcely been much worse. The turning point came, indirectly, with the abolition of the maximum wage, hardly an issue to a breadline club like Southport, but an issue which forced a lot of the bigger League clubs to trim down their vast playing staffs by unloading some of their still promising younger players who, they reckoned, were not quite going to make the grade at the highest level.