Barry Lloyd, who has died at the age of 75, had two periods as manager at Worthing, most notably during the highly successful period in the 1980s.

Barry started his footballing career in the youth sides at Chelsea, before moving on to Fulham, where he made over 250 league appearances in an eight-year period. He was an unused substitute at Wembley Stadium when Fulham were defeated by West Ham United in the 1975 FA Cup final.

In 1978 he moved to the USA to play for the newly-founded Houston Hurricane club, in the North America Soccer League. On returning to this country, Barry started his career in football management when he took over the reins at Southern League side Yeovil Town.

Worthing had joined the Isthmian League in 1977, playing in Division 2. By the start of the 1980s, club officials had stated an ambition to reach the Premier Division before our centenary in 1986, and manager Dave Cooke had assembled a squad that appeared to be good enough to start climbing the league.

Cooke resigned during the summer of 1981, having led us to 5th the previous season, and Worthing took the decision to hire Barry Lloyd, who had recently left Yeovil, as our first-ever full-time manager. His first match in charge was on 15th August 1981, when a Micky Edmonds goal gave us a 1-0 win at Basildon United.

Barry had made a couple of additions to the existing squad, goal-keeper Alan Dovey and former Portsmouth and Brighton & Hove Albion player Steve Piper. We remained undefeated in the first 16 league fixtures and ended the season as champions for the first time since leaving the Sussex County League in 1948, securing 93 points from 40 matches and scoring 95 goals.

The most notable signing for the 1982-83 season was former Sutton United player Mike Cornwell. Now playing in Isthmian League Division 1, Worthing won five of the first six league fixtures, but the focus on the league campaign was increasingly being distracted by an FA Cup run.

Starting in the preliminary round, by the end of October we had reached the 4th qualifying round and a home tie with Minehead. A late equaliser secured a draw and, after comfortably winning the replay, we faced Dartford at Woodside Road in the first round, only the second time we had ever reached that stage.

A 2-1 win meant that we would now travel to face Football League 3rd Division side Oxford United in round two. Barry had taken the club the furthest it had ever gone in the FA Cup and, at the time of writing, this has not been achieved since. Media coverage in the run-up to the match included a film on local TV news which showed Barry not only as manager but also serving behind the bar!

Oxford won the match 4-0 and now it was back to the league. Because of the fixture backlog, we did not start the second half of the season until the middle of February, when Farnborough Town came to Woodside as leaders and won, leaving us 20 points behind them with seven matches in hand but, when we played the return match at the end of April, the win took us to the top of the table. Another victory two days later secured the Division 1 title.

Barry’s new recruits for our first season in the Isthmian League Premier Division included defenders Gary Elphick and Tony Vessey, but Micky Edmonds was still scoring freely and we started the league campaign by winning the first seven matches (and drawing the next three). However, fortunes started to flag in the middle of the season and this year we had to settle for the runners-up spot, 17 points behind Harrow Borough.

We only managed five consecutive victories at the start of 1984-85, but another successful campaign ended with a second runners-up spot, behind Sutton United, this time only missing out on the title by four points. Worthing were aiming to apply for the Alliance League (now National League) this season, but the destruction of our grandstand at the end of April put a stop to that.

The loss of the stand also started to stretch the club’s finances and 1985-86 ended with us in the lower half of the table. In the summer of 1986, Barry resigned as manager and went to the Albion, where he would be assistant to Alan Mullery. His last match in charge during this spell was a 5-0 defeat at his old club, Yeovil, on 3rd May 1986.

During his five-year tenure as manager, Barry had overseen 274 matches, winning 147 and drawing 53.

Barry later became first-team manager at the Albion; after this, he took up a role on their scouting team.

Barry returned to Worthing in September 1996, this time in a mentoring role for our new manager, Gary Chivers. Chivers had played for the Albion, being hired when Barry was their manager, but found little success managing Worthing and resigned just before Christmas.

The manager who took over from Chivers was Sammy Donnelly, and it was when he left in November 2001 that Barry Lloyd returned to Worthing, initially as caretaker manager before taking the job permanently. His first match back in charge, on 24th November, ended in a 2-0 Isthmian League Division 1 victory at Carshalton Athletic.

That season Worthing finished just below mid-table, and the following year, the first of the new Isthmian League Division 1 South, we finished slightly higher. Barry resigned as manager during the summer of 2003, having been in charge for 84 matches, which included 33 wins and 17 draws. His last match as manager was on 3rd May 2003, a 4-3 win at home to Staines Town.

In recent seasons, Barry had been seen frequently at Worthing matches and remained a friend of many at Woodside Road. He will be sadly missed, especially by those who remember the good times he brought us in the 1980s.