But Tommy Tait was clearly a man to look out for himself. In crossing the border he did not go to a League club but to Bristol Rovers in the Southern League and therefore without a wage-cap. And there he was to win the 1905 title with then Sunderland in 1906 coming in with an offer that gave him the security he needed to return home and marry. Hs bride was Catherine Russell from the village of Salburgh north of Shotts and they were rapidly to have two children both born there.

In fact Tait was to remain at Sunderland for six seasons making just under two hundred league starts,, many alongside Charlie Thomson, and in 1911 a single cap when he partnered Newcastle's Wilf Low and Peter McWilliam. By then too the family had moved Wearside and was settled close to the ground but his time at Roker Park had not been without a blip. In 1909 he had been one of seventeen of the club's players to have joined the newly-formed Players Union, now the PFA and have been suspended.         

However, at the end of the 1911-12 season and coming up to his thirty-third birthday Tait and Sunderland parted company, he returning North for a season at Dundee and then dropping down to essentially two seasons at Armadale, where ther couple's third child was born, and a return to mining. And that work and family would by 1921 take him to Cleland , where he lived next door to a younger brother, John, also a miner and where in 1926 he took over a bar.