South Liverpool

South Liverpool took the Lancashire Combination three years running, in 1937, 1938 and 1939, a run that stood alongside the ambition driving the club at the time: an application for election to the Football League, lodged and rejected ten times between 1935 and 1939. The same 1939 season also brought the Welsh Cup, an unusual trophy for a side from Liverpool to be holding.

The club chasing those titles was itself a fresh start. It had been formed in April 1935 under the same name as an older South Liverpool side that had already drifted away and eventually became New Brighton. The new club rebuilt again decades later, going into liquidation in the early 1990s before being re-established around a committee in 1991.

Two players passed through on their way to bigger things: Jimmy Case in the 1970s, before Liverpool FC signed him, and John Aldridge, who came through the youth side before a move via Newport County took him to Anfield. Neither stayed long enough to be part of a later honours list built mostly out of West Cheshire League titles. The one night that drew the biggest crowd owed nothing to the league table: in 1967, Ferenc Puskás guested for the club in a fundraising friendly that sold out at 10,000.

Holly Park, the old ground in Garston, was pulled down in 2006; the club now plays at the Jericho Lane Sports Hub in Aigburth, in front of crowds nowhere near that size. What it has never settled into, for all the local sides it has met over the years, among them Waterloo Dock and Aigburth People's Hall, is a fixed rivalry to call its own.