It is perhaps unfair to think to choose a symbol of early football in the USA, Soccer, for the twelve years of the first playing of the American Cup. Pioneers are pioneers no matter their ability. But there are candidates, indeed interesting ones. Kearny has the Lancastrian Swithenby brothers of ONT or the Hoods of Rangers, New York has James Grant, Pawtucket the footballing philosopher, Alex Meiklejohn,  Fall River, Pat Stanton. But there is perhaps one players who covers all bases more than others in terms of where he played, how long and why. His name is Bernard Fagan, aka Barney Fagin.

Barney was said to be a player of some repute. And that he was. An 1891, American newspaper article describes him as having played for Hibernian. And that he did, for the 1886-7 season. It was the year that the Edinburgh club in February in beating Dumbarton won the Scottish Cup for the first and only one of three times in its history, the first time too that a club from outwith the West of Scotland had taken the trophy. And there he is left-back alongside international, James Lundie. And he is there again in April that same year when in Birmingham the Hibbie's are defeated by Aston Villa in the "great international match". He even scored, putting through his own goal, the third of three for Villa to no reply.    

In fact that same article describes Fagan as a Scotsman with also a clue to his actual origins in his previous team. Before Hibs he had turned out for a season for Leith Harps, a very Irish team in a then very Irish town. Barney Fagan was no exception. He was not Scots- but Irish-born, in December 1866 albeit just across the water in Co. Down, and not appearing in any Scottish records at all, although his father, also Barney, his mother, Sarah and younger brother, Patrick, do so in 1891 and in the heart of Edinburgh's port. It therefore seems probable the young Fagan had not arrived in Scotland until after 1881, so aged fourteen plus. It also means that, firstly, he would have learned much if not all his football in Scotland, the Scottish way, and, secondly, in 1886 he was just nineteen years old and by the end of the 1886-87 season just twenty with a full nine years between him and his lauded full-back partner.

From that Cup-winning Hibernian team Lundie would be immediately snapped up by Grimsby Town. In fact he would live out the remainder of his life in the Lincolnshire port. However the remainder of the team would remain more or less intact at least for the moment. The one exception was Barney Fagan. Later that same year he was on his way, not South but across the Pond. Why he went is unclear but it may have been simply , having reached twenty-one, so the age of majority, he could. In retrospect it was probably a mistake. In Glasgow Celtic was formed in 1888 and in looking for players then raided Hibernian mercilessly. John Tobin, Paddy Gallacher,  James McLaren, Willie Groves, John Coleman, Mick McKeown, Fagan's understudy, and Mick Dunbar all moved across with no reason why the young man might otherwise have been amongst them. But such is fate.

Instead on arrival in America our Barney seems to have headed if not quite straight for Soccer-town USA, Kearny, then to Newark.  There he and another Scot, Frank Cornell or Connell, joined the Almas and with immediate effect. The team with him at left-back and Cornell on the wing went through to the 1888 final of the American Cup defeating previously undefeatable O.N.T on the way, only to lose 1-5 to Fall River Rovers. one of several powerful teams emerging from the Massachusetts textile-town.

Now whether Fagan and Cornell were tapped up at that very time is unknown but by the following season to 1889 both were not only in the town of Fall Rover but playing in the Rovers line-up. Indeed with Fagan captain they were to go all the way to the next final and this time to victory. And they were there for the next campaign too albeit Barney had now transferred his playing allegiance to the Free Wanderers nearby but across the state-line in Pawtucket in Rhode Island and defeat in the semis, Rovers knocked out in the First Round by eventual winners, Fall River Olympics. Indeed such was their attachment to Fall River that in July 1890 Barney Fagan married Catherine McDonald, three years older than he, living in Fall River but born in Scotland, the wedding feast was held at Frank Cornell's house on Covel St. and the couple, after a honeymoon trip up the Hudson River, settled into married life at 31, County St.   

Covel St. is still lined with some of the original clap-board houses so typical of the region. The County St. house is no more but stood opposite a number of the textile mills that gave the town its prosperity. However, whether Fagan, and indeed Cornell, worked in them is open to doubt. They were clearly in all but name professional footballers, playing where they were "paid" the most as their next move makes clear. For 1890-91 they both joined Rovers' Fall River town rivals, East End, and with effect. It would take the Cup at the season's end. And by their next moves make it obvious too. For 1891-2 Cornell went back to Rovers, Fagan back to the Free Wanderers. And after that once back to East End for two seasons, with a further trophy there in the first season and a trip home in 1893, Barney travelling as a "stonecutter".

It was at that point that Frank Cornell seems to have run out of legs. 1895 seems to have been his last season, although he remained in the town married and died there in 1919 and is buried there too. And Barney Fagan seemed at first to have played his last game too whereas in fact he had been scooped up elsewhere. Still at full-back he joined a new outfit from New York, based on the Brooklyn Bridegrooms' baseball club and playing in the newly-formed American League of Professional Football (ALPF) i.e. openly paying-to-play. It was promoted by baseball's National League to fill stadium in the winter, and was to have, indeed cause, all sorts of problems. Whilst Brooklyn finished in pole-position, the whole edifice after challenging the American Football Association and therefore the American Cup collapsed within weeks, Brooklyn keeping going a while longer on friendlies but eventually also succumbing. 

So for the 1895-6 season it was back to the previous American Cup format. Barney Fagan now aged twenty-nine, returned to Fall River Rovers with his team, noticeably without him in the line-up, dismissed in the semi-final. And that seems to be it, at least for the Fall River club game. For the 1896-7 season there was an attempt to create a town-side out of the various team-remnants but it came too late for inclusion in a Cup competition that was itself under pressure from a generally declining economy. Indeed Fall River was particularly badly hit with closing mills, lay-offs and strikes. Instead Exhibition games were organised that included former ALPF players, perhaps Barney amongst them. They drew good crowds but otherwise more organised football there and later elsewhere simply faded away for the best part of a decade. And with it went Barney Fagan with just the faintest hints that he might have lived out his later life in Newport, RI, and New York, in fact in Brooklyn. But it is all against perhaps a wasted talent, the potential of there having been so much more - a playing-career in Scotland and/or England, perhaps even not Scottish but Irish cap or caps at a time when the game particularly in the North was going from strength to strength.