Amidst 11 stints with Scottish clubs – most of them either in his home-town of Dundee or in Arbroath, where he later lived and died – Bob Petrie played for two Football League clubs and for Southern League Saints. He was first seen in Southampton in February 1896 when, for the second consecutive season, the Southern League upstarts reached the First Round Proper of the FA Cup.

His team, Sheffield Wednesday, prevailed 3-2 and went on to win the Cup. Appropriately, when he signed for the Saints, 16 months later, he would embark on three seasons in which he would make almost a fifth of his appearances in the Cup, never missing a match as the Saints advanced to the semi-final in 1898 and the Final in 1900. He played all of those matches at left-half. The same was true of his regular League appearances both in his first and last seasons. In the interim season of 1898-99, injury obliged him to be flexible and he helped out in four positions.

Two days after the ill-fated Final against Bury, he played his last game for the club – although there is seemingly no suggestion that he was one of the disillusioned Scots who left the club as a consequence of the Anglo-Scottish divide, explained in Jack Farrell’s profile, that split the loyalties of the Final line-up.

After football, he worked in the weaving industry, as a jute-beamer loading the looms. He retired in 1937 after many years at Dundee Harbour with Messrs Melville & Dunn and Co timber merchants. His grandson, John Martin, left yet another Dundee club, Dundee North End, in 1954, to start a Football League career with Sheffield Wednesday and Rochdale.