John Goodall

John Goodall was probably the best Scots footballer of his era, the late 1880s to middle 1890s; not as important but probably more known than even James Kelly. Over the decade from 1888 he was to win fourteen caps and score twelve goals, a ratio of 0.86. Lionel Messi's is 0.58. Yet not a single Goodall strike was for Scotland. Because of where he was born they were for England, just as those of his brother, Archie, would be for Ireland. Both were sons of the military, their father a Clackmannan-shire soldier, their mother from Ayrshire, the couple marrying in Tarbolton in 1860. But the Queen's service took them to London in 1863, where and when John was born but not raised.

John and  Archie's father had died when the boys were both very young, in about 1865, and their mother returned to Scotland to live in Kilmarnock and in 1880 there remarry. Thus the lads were brought up entirely in the footballing hotbed at the time that was south of the town, learning not only the Scottish game but geographically open to the earliest overtures that English clubs made to Scottish talent. And John, even in that hotbed, was something of a prodigy. He started at Kilmarnock Burns and in 1880 at barely seventeen was already a part of the Kilmarnock Athletic club, whose team over the next five years, especially 1883-84 would be so denuded by players going South that by 1885 it was dissolved. 

Indeed, John by 1883 had been part of that exodus, going first in 1883 to Great Lever by Bolton for two seasons, Preston for four and Derby County for ten. In fact he would continue to play until he was fifty, including two years from 1910 as a very early Diasporan player/coach in France at Roubaix, a role he had first taken on for seven campaigns at Watford in Southern League and would for one more more or less to the Great War in the same tier of the game at Mardy in South Wales. In all he would make over four hundred starts, be the foil and tutor of many important English players in a period when that country achieved some success against Scotland internationally and in 1889 with Preston win the English League but never the Cup.

Post Mardy John Goodall and family would return to Watford to live, becoming a cricket groundsman, he having also played the the red-ball game at major county level for Derbyshire and for minor county Hertfordshire. In fact it would be as groundsman that he would recorded on his death in the town in 1942. He would also be shown as a widower. In 1887 he had in Preston married Sarah Rawcliffe, she from Paulton-le-Fylde by Blackpool, he recorded then as an Iron Turner, subsequently as a Tobacconist and only later as a Professional Footballer. And they were to have seven children, four girls and three boys, all born in Lancashire and Derbyshire. However, at the age of just sixty-one in Watford Sarah passed away. The year was 1920 and she would be outlived by John by more than two decades, he to be buried at the age of seventy-four within a long ball of town's football stadium then and now in the Vicarage Road Cemetery.

 

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