Jack Farrell twice signed for the Saints from Stoke of the Football League’s First Division.

His first arrival and his second departure were both mired in controversy.

As some Football League clubs struggled, in the mid-1890s, to meet their wage-bills and the prospects of imposing a maximum wage entered the agenda, it was possible for upstarts from the new Southern League to tempt players south. Both in 1894, in preparation for the inaugural season of this League, and again in the 1895 close season, Southampton especially targeted Stoke. On the latter occasion, they acted too hastily, with the result that they were censured by an emergency meeting of the FA and had to pay Stoke’s costs of £4 6s 3d (£4.32½p). Without doubt, centre-forward Jack Farrell was the “catch” of this second “Stoke invasion”.

Said to be fast, tricky and reliable,

he soon justified that reputation. Having missed only one game in his first season with the Saints, he was ever-present in 1896-97, when he captained them to their first Southern League title and to the Second Round Proper – their furthest yet – of the FA Cup. When the club retained their title in 1898 and reached the last four of the FA Cup, an injury in the drawn semi-final with Nottingham Forest meant that he missed the replay – notoriously won by Forest with a blinding blizzard behind them – and most of the League run-in.

Whereupon, he had a season back at Stoke, missing the Saints’ third successive championship, but he returned in time for another Cup-run in 1899-1900 – all the way to the Final. The Saints’ dire performance in the Final – a 4-0 defeat by Bury – has been attributed to a dressing-room dispute as to who should play at centre-forward: Farrell or Roddy McLeod? Farrell had played in both games of a replayed semi-final, but between the replay and the Final, McLeod and he had led the Southern League attack three times each.

The suggestion that their English team-mates wanted Jack to play, while the Scots were rooting for Roddy, has been discussed in detail by Dave Juson in Match of the Millennium, where he quotes at length from an inquest conducted, 12 years after the event, by the Southampton Pictorial, in which some of McLeod’s disappointed supporters were blamed for blatantly not trying. The outcome in the summer of 1900 was that both contenders left the club. Farrell returned to the Football League for a season with Second Division New Brighton but wound down his career in the Southern League, first with Northampton and then at West Ham. In December 1901, when the Cobblers lost 11-0 at The Dell, Jack had a ringside seat as Albert Brown, his latest successor at centre-forward, ran in seven goals for the Saints.

After West Ham, he returned to the Potteries and later became a publican in Tunstall. He was partial to a drink. In January 1898 after playing in Saints 2-1 victory over Leicester Fosse he went on a pub crawl with the fans which ended in a brawl. He was detained overnight after assaulting four people including a policeman and was punished with a £5 2s 0 d fine.