At this point it was once said that John's father, and that of Archie, born in 1865, had died. Certainly their mother at least returned to Scotland, to Edinburgh where in 1867 their younger sister was born, by 1871 was living in Kilmarnock and in 1880 there remarried. But new evidence indicated a different story. By 1871 a Richard Hunter Goodall was no longer in the army but the navy, a Royal Marine based by Portsmouth. And later that same year, divorced or bigamus, he was remarried in Hambledon to a twenty-two year-old, local girl, Eliza Langrish, starting a new life together. It seems by 1879 they had three girls and in 1891 a boy, another John, arrived too, to a father, who was a Naval Pensioner and Pipe-Maker. Indeed one who would died at the age of fifty-eight in Southampton.  

Thus it appears, whilst a second Goodall family was growing up in the South of England, the older one was being brought up entirely in Scotland in the footballing hotbed that at the time was in the south of Killy, the boys learning not only the Scottish game but geographically open to the earliest overtures that English clubs made to Scottish talent. And John, even in that cauldron, was something of a prodigy. He started at Kilmarnock Burns and in 1880 at barely seventeen was already a part of the Kilmarnock Athletic club, whose team over the next five years, especially 1883-84 would be so denuded by players going South that by 1885 it was dissolved. 

Indeed, John by 1883 had been part of that exodus, going first in 1883 to Great Lever by Bolton for two seasons, Preston for four and then Derby County for ten. In fact he would continue to play until he was fifty, including two years from 1910 as a very early Diasporan player/coach in France at Roubaix, a role he had first taken on for seven campaigns at Watford in Southern League and would for one more more or less to the Great War in the same tier of the game at Mardy in South Wales. In all he would make over four hundred starts, be the foil and tutor of many important English players in a period when that country achieved some success against Scotland internationally and in 1889 with Preston win the English League but never the Cup.