And for two seasons that was more or less where he remained. In 1921-22 he missed only one league game and a week before his twenty-second birthday won a first cap in a victory over England away. However, it was to be the only one. Increasing it became clear that Gilchrist did not get on with manager, Willy Maley. Now whether it was that or an attitude against authority on the player's part that became a problem is unclear but Jock increasingly would talk back and be missing at training, which he needed to keep up his speed, to the point that in January 1923 he was suspended and then sold on, with his approval, for a then substantial fee. 

He went South to Preston, seemingly taking with him the same attitude to training and discipline, and there he was essentially found out. He played only a few games and the slide really began - briefly player-trainer at Carlisle, three games for Third Lanark, five for Dunfermline and then he to took the boat to Canada, where he had family, en route to booming American soccer. But even there he managed just a few starts for Brooklyn and then Pawtucket before apparently dropping out of football completely, indeed seemingly forever.

However, there is a another, slightly alternative version of the tale. In February 1922, aged 21, Jock Gilchrist had married literally the girl-next-door, he recorded as a Professional Footballer. She was twenty year-old Catherine Kirk from 8, Balmoral Terrace but the marriage did not work. Certainly by the time he left for America he was using his father's address, his wife's only added to the crossing-manifest as an after-thought. And they clearly did not keep in touch. When she divorced him in 1928 she stated she did not know his whereabout. There were no children. All of which leaves the possibility that the problems he had at Celtic within a year of the wedding were at least in part caused by problems at home, not discounted by the fact that, having returned from America probably in 1931 and to Liverpool, there in 1934 he married Lillian Renshaw, with whom he was have six, possibly seven, children, whilst settling in Birkenhead, where Lillian had been born, and working as an Iron Worker and Erector.