When Tom Smith left his home-town football circles to become a winger at Deepdale, in 1897, First Division Preston already had a winger of that name. By the end of the season, the new Tom had made four appearances in the Football League side, compared with his namesake’s 53. Whereupon, Preston put them both up for sale. Two Southern League clubs – Tottenham and Southampton – swooped. The Spurs made off with the more experienced Tom, who would score for them when they won the FA Cup in 1901, while the Southampton directors settled for the lesser Tom. Or did they?

In a gossipy column of sundry reminiscences, some 14 years later, a Southampton Pictorial journalist related what he described as “an amusing anecdote” – to the effect that both buyers “claimed to have secured ‘the’ Smith.” The style of that 1912 snippet was tongue-in-cheek and it is hard to imagine that Southampton’s new boy would have maintained such a pretence or that any of the directors would have been so gullible – even after their Tom had won the 100 yards-race at the club’s Sports Day

In fact, Tom played in the Southern League side until January, missing only one game. He was then replaced by a new arrival, Jimmy Yates, and moved on, come the summer, to Southern League newcomers, Queens Park Rangers. He soon made his debut for them, against Spurs and – you couldn’t make it up – the other Tom Smith scored the only goal of the game. After a season with QPR and another season with Preston, where he hardly played, the lesser Tom Smith wound down his career at Barrow, newly elected to the Lancashire Combination.