Born to Gaelic-speaking immigrants from Donegal, Peter Meehan followed his father into the local pits, as a shale miner. The mining town of Broxburn was big enough to support four football clubs and Peter played for three of them, making his second move following an argument over money. As he progressed from Broxburn to success, as a right-back both sides of the border, he would continue to take a stand in one kind of dispute or another.Leaving Hibs, just before they joined the Scottish League in 1893, for the Football League, Peter had two seasons at Sunderland, who won the First Division championship in the second of them.

Even while at Sunderland, he managed to become the subject of controversy in the West Lothian Courier, in a dispute as to whether he could be registered to vote locally, while living in England. He soon returned to Scotland, joining Celtic for their championship season of 1895-96, during which he was capped. But he was back in the Football League, with Everton, in time to win his first FA Cup runners-up medal in 1897.

And so to the Southern League, for a record £200 fee, to be part of Southampton’s championship-winning side in 1899 and to lose another FA Cup Final in 1900.

The Anglo-Scottish split in the Saints’ ranks, as to who should have been at centre-forward in the Final, has been explained, in detail, in Jack Farrell’s profile. A perhaps predictable feature of the fall-out was that Meehan quit.

He returned to Scotland, via a First Division swansong (just six appearances) with Manchester City and a season in the Lancashire League with Barrow. He next fitted in a season with Clyde in the Scottish Second Division, amid more games in Broxburn. In 1905, he emigrated to Nova Scotia, Canada. Unable to find work as a soccer coach, either in Canada or the USA, he returned to mining. He died at the age of 43, with his wife expecting their eighth child. Even his death created a divided camp, with some of his kin claiming that he succumbed to appendicitis, while others clung to the more romantic family folklore that he had died of pneumonia, after spending a night in the snow looking for a lost nephew.