A product of junior football in his native Ayrshire, Sam Shearer’s departure for Southampton prompted his last club, Patna, to request a set of shirts by way of compensation. Sam showed up well enough in pre-season trials to suggest that he was worth it and he went straight into the Southern League side, at inside-left, for the opening game of the 1908-09 season. His run of four games would be his longest in the side, however, until his final flurry of five games at the end of the following season.

A creator rather than a marksman, his dribbling skill brought with it two problems.

First, he kept the ball so close to his feet that his ankles inevitably took plenty of kicks and bruises. Secondly, it was the kind of individual skill that sometimes baffled his team-mates as much as his opponents. Whether he was nursing an injured ankle or a sense of being misunderstood, he was more out of the first team than in it. So, after two frustrating seasons, he headed back to Scotland, for more junior football, now in Dumfriesshire, pending any senior club being able to afford the £100 transfer fee placed on him. It was only when that bounty on his head was reduced to £30 that he joined Bradford Park Avenue for a brief taste of Second Division football.

After which, he emigrated to Swissvale in Pennsylvania, USA, where he worked as an engineer in the Union Switch and Signal Company. But he didn’t turn his back on his country of birth because he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force on 16 July 1918 in Cleveland, Ohio and arrived in England on board the HMS Arteus on 25 August. Whatever action he saw, however, was limited owing to the war coming to an end a few months later. He returned to Canada on the SS Carminia leaving Liverpool on 1 February 1919 and he was officially discharged on the 4 March in Toronto. He was not finished offering his services to the military as he signed draft papers, even as he approached 60 in 1942, for the US Army.