When I read that he was the player idolised by the child and teenage Stanley Matthews interest is pricked. Matthews was born in Hanley in Staffordshire, one of the Five Towns of the Potteries. It meant that, whilst he began and ended his career at Stoke City, with the famous  fourteen years at Blackpool between, he managed one team. And it was the team he supported as the same child and teenager.

You see, Stoke is Stoke just one of those Five Towns, and, although it next door to the south a Hanley-boy would would naturally have gravitated to the club that is now half the distance away to the north at Vale Park in Burslem, another Five Towner, but from 1912 to 1950 was at the Recreation Ground in Hanley itself, ten minutes from the house, in which the Matthews stayed. That club is Port Vale and it was there that an otherwise, unsung spent an eleven year, professional career, arriving not quite twenty in 1921 and leaving some three hundred and forty games later at the end of the 1932 season for probably a single wind-down year at non-League Congleton. The almost one-clubber was Bob Connelly. And given the Matthew's hero status he was neither a winger or even a forward but a half-back, a centre-half.

As far as I am aware there was never an offer for Connelly to move away from the Potteries, as least whilst he was playing. He clearly was never near a Scotland cap but he epitomises the many players from North of Border, who did not, as so many, play in the upper echelons of the  game down south but had a part, in his case not least in the inspiration of one of England's, England's greatest footballers ever, in the English game, then and, indeed, now.

So who was Bob Connelly. He was born in 1901 in Glasgow, in St. Rollox. His father, Henry, was the son of an Irish immigrant, also Robert Connelly, from Co. Cavan and in 1901 was a stoker on the railways. His mother was Mary Ann Howard, also from a Glasgow-Irish family. His football career began, presumably during the Great War at Townhead Hibernian and then at Shettleston Juniors but with the ending of hostilities in 1918 he was not called up and could take advantage of football beginning once more and Port Vale building up, having returned to the League in 1919.

Throughout his time at Vale the club would be in the English Second Division with the exception of 1929-30. With him in the side it was until 1925 very much in the lower half. However, in that year, Connelly at twenty-five entering his prime, it was eighth as Leicester and Manchester United were promoted ahead of Derby, Portsmouth, Chelsea, Wolves and Southampton, and eighth once more following season and the one after that. Yet the position could not be sustained. 1928-9 ended in relegation but only for a season. In 1930 the club won the Third Division North outright and followed it with a fifth position in the Division above, the best position it has ever achieved.

However, as coincidentally or not Bob Connelly's legs were finally giving out at the age of thirty-one a tumble to the place above relegation followed and, with him gone, in 1936 the drop once more took place. By then Connelly had turned to coaching, first, it is said, in Ireland and then in Holland at Dordrecht from 1934 to 1936, from where he was released as the club could no longer afford him. He returned to Glasgow. It was not the first time he had been back. In 1930 in Springburn he had married Jessie Fair, two years his younger. They did not seem to have had any children.

Once back in their hometown Connelly seems to dropped out of football for good. He and Jessie for a period ran a newsagents/tobacconist in Denniston but perhaps because of the war and connections he had still through his father he is reported to have worked in the Springburn Locomotive Works before in 1943, by then living a stone's throw from Celtic Park, falling ill. He was just forty-two years old yet clearly had severe heart problems severe. Indeed, they were enough to cause his death, in Law Hospital that October. Just a decade after finishing a solid, a journeyman career at the hard end of professional sport, fit as dog, robust, in two of those seasons not missing a single game, it seems his body had simply given out.