In 1888 Preston North End won the first Football League and the Double, with its victorious team in the FA Cup Final including seven Scots. But it might have been eight but for the match in December 1884, in which the then North End captain had his leg so badly broken that he never played again. His name was John Belger, he was just twenty-one, was a centre-forward, had already been at the club two seasons, during which he had made a mark or two and the epithet, "Goalkeeper-Smasher".

Earlier that same year he had been top of list drawn up by the Scottish Football Association of fifty-four players plying their trade with English clubs. It was a document, to the names on which was to be sent a warning of loss of eligibility to play for Scotland should they remain Down South, ignoring the fact that they were there to be paid one way or another for playing and were thus ineligible in any case and in Belger's case and certainly one other's, and here is the twist, that eligibility did not actually lie North of the Border anyway.

The "other" was John Goodall, the son of a Clackmannanshire soldier and a Kilmarnock-mother, who was raised in the East Ayrshire town, had played for Kilmarnock Athletic but had been born in barracks in London and therefore, under rules introduced by the SFA only the previous year, could in any case play only for England. And the same applied to Belger. Whilst his father was a biscuit baker from Glasgow, who died young, his mother from East Ayrshire also, from Stewarton, his elder brother having been born in the former, his younger sister in the latter, where all three had been raised with John beginning his senior football as a teenager in the city in Govan at South-Western, he himself, a tailor to trade, had been born in 1863 in Hull.

However, even after the injury Belger, unlike many who had and would head from Scotland Down-the-Road, was not abandoned. In fact he was soon found a living still in Preston as a Publican. First it would be at The Oddfellows' Arms, then by 1891 at the Black Horse Hotel, which is still there in the town on Friargate, and by when he in 1889 had married the widow, Mary Robinson, taking on her three children and starting a family of their own, and finally in 1895 at The Fleece Inn, also still there.

However, it was at The Fleece that in 1895 and aged just thirty-two that John passed away, of consumption, tuberculosis, survived by his wife, who remarried but would herself die in 1902 and still on the premises. John Belger is buried in Preston Old Cemetery, a Scottish England centre-forward, who never was. Imagine the Scotland-England game of 1888 with not just Goodall but him alongside, both just twenty-four and leading the line for England as for the first time in a decade Scotland was defeated and at home by potentially not just one but two Ayrshire men.