The Scots Football Historians' Group
(serious football history, factual facts and stats with actual numbers)
Cathkin Park has been designated by Historical Environment Scotland. Two more internationalist have now been found to be buried there, nineteen in all plus other major footballing figures. We await the fate of Cathcart Cemetery any day now with Hampden Bowling Club still to go. So see below and keep the pressure on. Iconic sites countrywide are still in danger.
We have compiled and given HES and the Ministry of Culture the list. In this World Cup year it is up to them to act.

This site is dedicated to the serious, fact-based exploration of Scottish football, that is the modern game largely created here, and Scots football, taken to the World in passion, minds and feet by our forebears, largely amateur in the true sense, who in so doing created the beautiful, global game. Our aim is to un-cover and relate the real stories of and backgrounds to this passion for the World game and preserve the legacies no matter what and where globally. We research, spotlight, advocate, mark, preserve and restore, all voluntarily. Now we even comment, so before scrolling on to enjoy or use our content first consider a donation.

Donations

SFHG Aims

- to continue, aid and enlarge the research done by us and serious others on the Scots contribution home and abroad to the World game and post it here on-line, a site which, as our own time allows, we are constantly building.
- to honour on-line and in the media with biographies and articles by us and significant others and wherever possible physically, at home and abroad with plaques and restorations, those many Scots who have made important contributions at all levels to that same World game.
- in Scotland itself to encourage the exploration by all those with interest of Scotland's remarkable, indeed pivotal, global contribution to that same World game.

To do this final one we began with the creation of a series of virtual, footballing trails, The History Trails, and, within some, community Rambles, Strolls and Drive-Throughs, that can be followed on foot or by car just as we have done. See above.

And finally we hope that our work will catch the attention, as it has already again both at home and abroad, of still more descendants of those same contributors, and encourage them to come forward to accept proudly the accolades due to their forebears.

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Advice for the World Cup

Don't bother with Florida. It's hot and over-rated. And you know how badly youse burn.

Get yourself flights to wherever in the the North-East of the States, then either hire a camper-van or simply a car, buy yourself a tent and some camping gear over there. New England is beautiful in June and full of excellent camp-sites.

Then whilst there follow our New England Trail to see where and how we Scots, our forebears, gave the New Englanders our game in the first place. And with the Kearny/Paterson Trail, understand how we did it for New Jersey and New York too.

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Update and Urgent Appeal!!

Hampden Bowling Club, the First Hampden - Scotland's, your and the World's unique footballing history under threat

Over the last period the Cathkin Park site, in Glasgow's southern suburbs, actually in a public open-space and still used for football, and the therefore the remains of the second of Queen's Park's Hampden Parks and Third Lanark's former ground had been under threat from commercial encroachment. However, in the last few weeks, after a campaign with SFHG heavily involved, it has been made relatively safer by official "designation" by the government agency, Historic Environment Scotland (HES). It is under the Minister of Culture and all involved are due praise and thanks.

However, matters do not end there. Also within the last weeks the site, just a few hundred yards away, of the first Hampden, the Global Game's first ever purpose-built stadium has come under similar threat. The grounds have been used for the last one hundred and twenty years by Hampden Bowling Club (HBC), which due to onerous lease-demands from Glasgow City Council will be dissolved in February next. The land will then be in limbo. Meanwhile, requests for separate designation of it are being filed with HES, with also the suggestion of Cathkin's being extended to both locations and even the possibility of them being used for a new Scottish Football Museum, starting not in 1945 but 1871, even earlier perhaps, and actually covering our Golden Eras, Hampdens One and Two included.

The more voices added to those requests the better. We urge you to write to HES and the Minister of Culture with your concerns. Addresses and emails can be easily found on the Net.

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Steve Clark, World Cup 'n Form

At SFHG we rarely look at anything beyond the Second World War because that is the period covered almost exclusively, and to the detriment, in our opinion, of Scotland's true standing in the World Game, by the Scottish Football Museum. But this is one of the exceptions because here direct comparisons can be made

Scottish football had two Golden Eras. Best of all, and perhaps to you surprisingly, was the short period from 1921 to 1926 when, on the 3-1-0 basis, the points-won to points-possible ratio was 78%. Had we gone that might have made us winners of the 1930 World Cup. After all the American team with five somewhat journeyman Scots in it reached the semi-final, whilst, even the period from 1874 to 1887 when Scotland was de jure World Champions, the same ratio was only 73%. And this compares with the dire 1950s when it was just 22%.

Which brings us, but not directly, onto Steve Clark. In reaching this coming year's World Cup his teams have had a ratio of 54%. But then even in making it to the disappointment of the Euros it had been a point higher. Furthermore, when Craig Brown's made it to the Mondial in 1998 his ratio had been 58%, in 1986 it had been under Jock Stein and, on Stein's death, Alex Ferguson 55%, with Stein in 1982 doing it with 45%, yet Ian McColl failing to do so in 1966 with 67% but a team in the end decimated by injury.

So on the face of it for June a good degree of caution is needed. But there is a caveat and for once a good one. In the last ten games of the campaign, the ones that mattered, Clark's men achieved 63% and with a maintenance of that sort of form (and luck) there is the possibility, the God's willing, of not just a good party off it but on-field going perhaps not far far but at least further than ever before.

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Publications

"Fifty Scottish Footballers"

SFHG's first ever publication is out and available to buy,

allowing 10 days for posting, by clicking on:

"Fifty Scottish Footballers" by Alistair Firth and Martin Donnelly

The inestimable Andy Mitchell in his foreword says of it, "This is a book that is close to my heart............This array of 50 Scotland internationalists is a wonderful way to raise awareness of this work... (the tracing and preservation of these and other football graves) ...and the proceeds from this book should help to ensure it continues.

Martin and Alistair have selected an eclectic range of men who won caps in the early (and more recent) years, some of them stars of the day like Bobby Walker and RS McColl, but many of them simply honest pros who had an interesting life (and death) beyond the football field. All of them have a story to tell, all of them have a grave that can be visited (and honoured)"

And there is and will be more to come.

Sound

The "Short, an' tae Feet" Podcasts

Now - the first of another way of SFHG putting Scots football-history reet! More to come.

Bo'ness - Ramsays and Easton, Finland and Chile

Thimble St .

And to come:

Newmilns & Darvel, Sweden and Spain

Lybster to Logie - the Andalusian Way

Geo Genovese and Doig - the Letham Boys

For more info click on: Podcasts

Vision

Jimmy Lang

And just released with our cooperation and therefore complete approval is this short on the life and times of Glasgow's Jimmy Lang, a World's first professional footballer. To view, click HERE.

Research

Anwoth - the oldest, known football ground in the World confirmed!

Click on Anwoth to find out how organised football was played in Kirkcudbright four hundred years ago.

PS: And this is how Television Francaise, the French equivalent of BBC 1, reported it in its coverage of the last Women's Euro Cup Final. On the BBC there was zip, whereas on French TV the story is right out there as an "Historic Discovery" -GO.

Anwoth - Was football born in Scotland, not England?

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Renton & The Vale - the Unmaking, Remaking, Breaking and Who
(But the creation of the Scottish Game)

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A New and Scottish Historiography of Association Football - coming soon

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Chapman, McGrory, Dean, Roberts and the Myth of Arsenal and W:M

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The Scots in Argentine Football

Contrast this with Alumni, which heaps praise on Scots in the Introduction and from then on calls us English or British.

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NB: Here is an interesting, if somewhat flippant, take in part on the early Scottish-game and from a source Down South. So perhaps the English are beginning to get a grip on actual football-history and not just their class-gas-lit version.

See: The Rebellion that Turned Football Professional

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"So, pal, wuar ya gaen"
or "Foxborough? Where and what's there?"

So, they're telling us it is Boston for the games, ba' et is na'. The city has and has had little or nothing to do with the round-ball game apart from a very brief period in the 1920s with the artificially-created, Boston Soccer club and an eighty-year con itself based on a sixty-year, upper-class try-on.

In 1862 a group of well-to-do preparatory-school pupils, several from outwith the city, had started a football club. The first president was seventeen-year-old Gerrit Miller. It was named Oneida, for a town in up-state New York, and it lasted three years, playing what would became known as the Boston Game.

And that might have been it except that just over a decade later in matches in 1874 between the universities of Harvard, from by Boston, and Montreal's McGill the Boston rules were used, then in 1923 a ball said to have been used in original the Oneida games was re-discovered by Miller and prominently placed in a Boston museum and in 1925 the surviving members again of Oneida decided to erect a monument, to themselves, and place it on Boston Common.

But here is the three-fold grift. The early 1920s saw an explosion, a boom of Association football in the United States so, with the Harvard-McGill Game seen as a precursor to American football, the possibility of more kudos still, this time for and from the round-ball game, might well have been a temptation too far. The sudden appearance after sixty years of a ball is remarkable, particularly one in such fine condition, yet apparently untested for date, that of a more or less round one still more remarkable, especially as the ball engraved on Boston Common plinth would be oval. And to top it off there was later revisionism. By the 1980s the monument was weather-worn and our football in the USA was finally beginning a real up-surge. The North American Soccer League had started in 1967. It would lead in 1990 to US requalification after forty years for the World Cup. And meantime the soccer community in the States had paid for a plinth-refurbishment, but with the carving of an oval ball being replaced by that of a round one. That has since been reversed but the intention, as had quite possibly been that of the founders, seems to have been to ride the wave by falsely claiming Oneida played the Association game. It did not, not least because our football did not exist until 26th October 1863, and then in its most developmental form.

So back to next year and where is it that these "Boston" games are to be played. And the answer is Foxborough, in a stadium that can for football, American with the Patriots, World with Revolution, be maxed out to hold between 20,000 and 25,000. It is Pittodrie plus a bit. And where is Foxborough itself? It is thirty miles south of the so-called host-city, making that soubriquet a bit like, for example, Glasgow claiming to be the source of the Scottish Passing-Game, indeed the Scottish-Game, when in fact it was, say, the Vale of Leven. It could never happen, could it? And what football history does Foxborough actually have, with the answer very simply "none". The oval-ball Boston Patriots moved to the town in 1971 and as a result were renamed. The Kraft family, which had made its money from "forest products" bought the club in 1994, founding the round-ball Revolution in 1996, since when it has been largely an under-achiever. In its coming-up-to 30 seasons of existence it has been out of the lower half of whatever table thirteen times, and just three times top of its league. In fact the only extended period when that has not been the case is one with a distinctly Scottish connection.

In 1999, Troon-born Steve Nichol, then thiry-eight, ex. of Ayr, then Liverpool and a twenty-seven time Scottish international left for the United States to play for the Boston Bulldogs, also not from Boston itself but the nursery team to the Revolution. Then in 2000 he stepped up to coach, at the beginning of 2002 did so again, to assistant-coach at the Revolution itself and five months later to head-coach. The club had finished third of four in the Eastern Division. Nichol in his first year took them to first-place and the eight-team play-offs, losing only in the final. Moreover, he was able to sustain good performances until 2010 until a rapid fall-off led to his dismissal in 2011, at which point he has neatly stepped across to commentating.

But outwith slightly flailing Foxborough there are more than just recent stats about. There is history right back to the beginning of the game across The Pond, and it is, fist, closer than the Massachusetts capital and, second, also Scots. Twenty miles to the south of the Gillette Stadium, half an hour by train from Foxborough's neighbouring town, Mansfield, and across the state-line into Rhode Island is Pawtucket. Five miles further on is Providence and five miles more, Johnston. Furthermore, still just in Massachusetts and forty minutes south-east of Foxborough is Fall River and fifteen miles beyond that New Bedford. In the 1920s these last two two towns had been at the core of the US game, as had Pawtucket. Indeed Pawtucket had been there since the turn of the century. Moreover, it and also neighbouring Providence had even been at the heart of the game's first implantation from 1884. In 1893 under the presidency of John Clark and by defeating New York Thistle Pawtucket Free Wanderers had even claimed that year's America Cup, with Fall River teams winning it both the years before and after.

And in all this plus the Boston Soccer Club the Scottish influence was pivotal with this picture of Boston SC's 1920s star-players - Ballantyne, McNab, McArthur, Fleming and McMillan - more indicative than any words. Massachusetts and Rhode Island football was founded by and on Scots. In the decade before the professional game's first collapse from 1930 our New England Trail lists thirty-six, to which can be added the five above.

And of the forty-one one, ten would play for the US national team, two even at the 1930 World Cup, two would play for Canada, and seven had already won Scottish caps and three more, Wishaw's Bob McAulay, Glasgow's Danny Blair and Joe Kennoway, would go on to do so. Furthermore, there are earlier pioneers still including the Philosopher-Footballer, Alex Meiklejohn. In his time one of the finest minds in America he had been born in Rochdale with his family on the way from Neilston to Rhode Island. Yet in his younger days and true to his roots, he had played, then as an amateur, centre-half, a super-smart, Scottish centre-half, in Pawtucket's YMCA team before for the year from 1895 acting as the Treasurer of the American Football Association.

Meiklejohn would pass away in 1964 in Berkeley in California but others, contemporary and subsequent, would settle in their adopted towns round-about and die there too. Three more of the earliest, amateur pioneers, Alex Love, Alex Jeffery and William Moore, drawn also to Pawtucket by the Conant Mill that was to be taken on by the Coats thread company of Paisley, are buried in Central Fall's Moshassuck Cemetery. Two later professional ones, Johnstone's James Johnston and Paisley's William Adam, are in Swan Point Cemetery just south of Pawtucket. Four, Airdrie's Geordie Robertson and Robert Perry, Steventon's Andy Auld and Joe Kennoway can be found in Johnston's Highland Memorial Park. Kilmarnock's Charlie McGill lies in Fall River's Oak Grove Cemetery with Tec White, from Airdrie once more, in the Assonet Burying Ground.

And there is one last Scot to note; one, who could be considered the "Father of American Soccer". He is William Clark, founder and initial captain of the country's first formal team, ONT, Clark's "Our New Thread", formed in 1883 in Kearny, New Jersey. Born in Paisley, the company's base, and clearly with a Scottish love of the game per se, in fact he did not stay long at the footballing helm, eventually following in his father's footsteps as a thread-mill manager. In his case it was to be another owned by the company, when it and Coats, also from Paisley, combined. It would be again in Rhode Island, but in Westerley, on the border with Connecticut and the New York-Foxborough road. And it is there too he would die and is buried, completely un-lauded at least so far.

But here at SFHG we research and remember, so, whilst you are in America in June you might, between the games and fun, perhaps, find the time for a little solemnity and to honour with a visit, flowers or a scarf any or all of our, of your own in a way, of which the historically myopic US Soccer industry seems incapable, either physically or financially. It does not remember it is "No Scots, No Soccer" but we do.

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People-History - Argentina and Iceland

An Appeal for Information

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The Rebellion that Turned Football Professional

Argentina's Alexander Lamont in 1891

Sometimes paper and on-line research can only take us so far and both early football in Argentina and Iceland are cases in point. In such situations we first reach out to the countries in question for help and it is often forthcoming. But here blanks have been drawn and so we look for other sources both abroad and at home, hence the appeal. What we are looking for is to be contacted by anyone in Scotland or, indeed, elsewhere, who might recognise any of the photos above of Alex Lamont and James B. Ferguson or have family histories that might include either of them and in Iceland a third name, Frank McGregor.

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South Africa's Alexander Lamont

Alexander Lamont - the organiser in 1891 of Argentina's first Football Championship was the Scot, Alexander Lamont. He also captained the winner of the competition, St. Andrews (See photo). He was then in 1892 to play mainly for the Quilmes club but in 1893 was still on-field and also Secretary of the league's permanent, second iteration. However, in 1894 he left The Argentine seemingly forever with the possibility that he went first to Brazil and perhaps then to South Africa. An Alex Lamont of more or less the right age died and was buried in Johannesburg in 1927. His family, now in Australia, have supplied the photo above but neither they nor we know much about what happened in-between. Can you help?

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Iceland's James B. Ferguson in 1895

James B. Ferguson and Frank McGregor - football is said to have arrived in Iceland in 1895. It came in the form and feet of James B. Ferguson, said at the time to be aged twenty-two, to be from Glasgow and in Reykjavik, working for a local printer. There is even a photo, football under arm, of him as he introduced not just "soccer" but also gymnastics.

But that is it. There is no hard indication of his story before or after 1895 just as there is none of a second Scot, Frank McGregor, said to be an Engineer and recognised as the founder just four years later in 1899 of Iceland's first football club. KR. Again can you help?

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The Repository

- storage unit of current and more recent articles

---------------------------------------- Current Thinking ---------------------------------------

Comment, Concern and Critique

The Passing-Game
(More Facts over Myths)

The conventional argument, the accepted history of football, has been for as long as seems to be remembered that what had made Scottish Association football different, for that is effectively the only set of round-ball rules to which we have ever played, and for a long period by results demonstrably superior was its "passing-game". And at its core was the assertion that the source had been the Queen's Park club of Glasgow in the 1870s. However, it is seeming increasingly possible, indeed probable, that, as is the case with several elements of what is academically called the game's "historiography", it is not and never has been correct. And the reason is that the view until now has been largely based on the interpretation of events put forward in the "History of Queen's Park Football Club 1867-1917", dated 1920, published in 1921 and produced by Richard Robinson, a jobbing sports-writer, a pen for hire with QP connections, an interpretation that is presently, mainly because of what is now being uncovered through digitisation, under challenge.

Robinson's was a work designed to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the club's foundation but fell, perhaps unknowingly but quite possibly not, at an unfortunate time. In 1900 The Spiders had "agreed" to join the Scottish League a decade after its foundation. But to The Great War they had never finished in the upper part of the table, had actually found themselves bottom in 1906, 1910, 1913, 1914 and only recovering in the War years. But post-War, as the game re-grouped, the club almost immediately struggled once more and when the Second Division was revived would after just a year be relegated to it never to return.

And it is that which begs the question, whether the club was sensing what was already in the air and, with an, until then, position in the Scottish game beyond its performances on the field and with Hampden Park to be paid for, wanted to shore up its position. If so, what better way, if it could not justify by means of its contemporary position, than to inflate its historical one. It is rather like what was happening in the United States as in the 1920s "soccer" began to boom and sixty years after the fact the Oneida club of Boston tried to maintain that its games from the 1860s were the first manifestation. But it was a try-on, gas-lighting, the two major problems in Oneida's case being that, whilst it had certainly played football, the club itself had been founded in 1862 so before the Football Association and the ball they had used had not been round. And it is to a similar degree that the term gas-lighting applies on this side of the water in the case of Queen's Park. Passing existed, organisation too and there is now actually documentary evidence that the Hampden club was originator even in Scotland of neither.

So what is the evidence? It comes from two main sources, both of which predate not the arrival of Association rules but the full Association game North of the Border. The caveat is there because Association Rules were used in Scotland in the 1860s but not 11-a -side. And here there is a choice of when. It is either in the middle of 1871 when Queen's Park agreed by entering the FA Cup fully to accept and play to the rules from London of the Football Association, 11-a side included, or on 5th March 1872, when the club kicked off, as it turned out, for its first, and only, match in that season's competition.

And the first evidential source is Sheffield. There archival searching of newspaper reports has more than adequately shown that gradually in the decade from 1861 organisation and passing became part, albeit still a relatively small part, an element, of normal, Sheffield-Rules play. Confirmation can be found, for example, in the bones of the paper:

The Evolution of Football Passing in Nineteenth-Century Britain

And the second of the sources is The Royal Engineers. Founded in 1863, so just a year after the Football Association, the "Sappers" had seen it all with time to think about the game and again gradually apply what else but military logic. In fact the Wikipedia page on the Royal Engineers Association Football Club, to the writer of which go very grateful thanks, produces a potentially succinct analysis, if one clearly with the aim of contradicting specifically Scottish claims, of the basics of the team's approach and thus contribution but badly jumbles points on "passing" with "organisation". However, by remedying that with some re-jigging a much clearer picture with timeline emerges as follows.

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"All of these developments occurred before and independent of the 1872 match between England and Scotland", "the early accounts all confirm that the Engineers were the first club to play a passing game of cooperation and organisation with both their forwards and their defence. Although they could also play rough – as would be expected for an army team – The Engineers are the first side to be considered to play the football "beautifully"" and "unlike the 1872 Glasgow international, the contemporary evidence above shows that the Engineers' team playing style benefited their team play by winning games".

Organisation

1867 - "The club was founded in 1863, under the leadership of Major Francis Marindin; the earliest game recorded for the Engineers against a non-military side is a 3–0 home win over No Names Club in March 1867. 1868 - "by early 1868, a contemporary match report states "For the R.E.s Lieuts Campbell, Johnson and Chambers attracted especial attention by their clever play"" 1869 -"an 1869 report says they "worked well together" and "had learned the secret of football success – backing up"; whereas their defeated opponents had "a painful want of cooperation" 1871 - "in a match of March 1871 against Wanderers their victory was due to "irreproachable organisation" and in particular that both their attacks and their backing up were both "so well organised" Early 1870s -"in the early 1870s Wall (Sir Frederick Wall) states that the "Sappers moved in unison" and showed the "advantages of combination over the old style of individualism" Early 1872 - "that the engineers were the first side to break the trend of dribbling is shown in a contemporary account of their victory against Crystal Palace in early 1872. This said that: "very little dribbling was displayed" February - "there is evidence that opponents sometimes adjusted their playing style to counteract the organisation and passing of the Engineers. For example, in February 1872 against Westminster School, a brief contemporary match report states that: "The school captain took the precaution of strengthening his backs, deputizing HDS Vidal to cooperate with Rawson and Jackson and so well did these three play in concert... they succeeded in defying the... RE forwards" "what is most notable about this (1872 Westminster) report is that it confirms that the Royal Engineers "played beautifully together" November 1872 - "the evidence above contains detailed descriptions of passing that are lacking in reports of the 1872 Glasgow international. For example, in a lengthy account the Scotsman newspaper makes no mention of passing or combination by the Scottish team and specifically describes the Scottish attacks in terms of dribbling: "The Scotch now came away with a great rush, Leckie and others dribbling the ball so smartly that the English lines were closely besieged and the ball was soon behind" and "Weir now had a splendid run for Scotland into the heart of his opponents' territory"" March 1872 - "similarly, the 5 March 1872 match between Wanderers and Queens Park contains no evidence of ball passing, although the Scottish team are acknowledged to have worked better together during the (the 1872) first half, this contemporary account acknowledges that in the second half England played similarly: "During the first half of the game the English team did not work so well together, but in the second half they left nothing to be desired in this respect." The Scotsman concludes that the difference in styles in the first half is the advantage the Queens' Park players had "through knowing each others' play" as all came from the same club" 1873 - "the Royal Engineers were the first football team to go on a tour, to Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield in 1873.[Wall's memoirs state that this tour introduced the combination game to Sheffield and Nottingham.".

Passing

"By 1870, ball passing was a feature of the Engineers style: "Lieut. Creswell, who having brought it up the side then kicked it into the middle to another of his side, who kicked it through the posts the minute before time was called", "In February 1871 against Crystal Palace it is noted that "Lieut. Mitchell made a fine run down the left, passing the ball to Lieut. Rich, who had run up the centre, and who pinched another [goal]" "In November 1871 similar passing tactics are described in a contemporary account of a game against the Wanderers in which two goals were scored through tactical passing: "Betts, however, soon seized his opportunity, and by a brilliant run down the left wing turned the ball judiciously to Currie, who as judiciously sent it flying through the strangers' goal in first rate style". Later in the match it is reported that "Lieut G Barker, turning the ball to Lieut Renny-Tailyour who planted it between the posts", (and) "turning" the ball clearly points to the short pass."

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From the above there are two immediate observations to be drawn. The first is that organisation is mentioned far more frequently than passing, eleven times to three. The second is that the first mention of organisation predates that of passing by three years. Thus in both cases the suggestion is the latter is a consequence of the former and therefore the RE's was not firstly a "passing-game" per se, to which can be added that there is little evidence even that it ever really progressed to one. This is born out by their approach to formation. In the 1872 FA Cup Final in winning The Wanderers lined up as 1-1-8, whereas RE took the field as 2-1-7, a subtle difference perhaps but one that was, if at least considered, hardly radical. Then in 1874 it was 1-2-7, simply matching Oxford University, in 1875 then looks to have been 2-1-7 once more and by the 1878 final the Scottish 2-2-6 had been adopted.

So if it was not Sheffield, albeit that there passing was being employed but again with little evidence of a "passing-game", with no better reason really required beyond that it was not playing Association football at the time and it was not The RE, because their prowess was organisation, there remains a space, one into which Queen's Park could and had been neatly fitted. But here once more there are problems.

The first is that Queen's Park's approach appears also to have been organisational. Robert Gardner as captain was recorded even before 1872 as giving out written instructions prior to matches. But instructions tell where generally to position and perhaps how to move but they cannot do the same for when to hold and when to release the ball. Those judgements can only be made in game. And in any case, whilst Queen's Park began in mid-1872, if not earlier, with mimicking the English 1-2-7 before in November 1872 for the international switching to the completely innovative 2-2-6, they, as contemporary match reports show, then immediately reverted. Indeed it may even have been the root of ructions within the club that caused Gardner and others to leave but revert they certainly did. Moreover, by the time, albeit just months later, they realised the error of their ways matters has already moved on. Vale of Leven, The Vale, continued through the first half of 1872 in it several encounters with Queen's Park to use only 2-2-6. And before the end of the year Renton was off its own bat already playing a development of the same, i.e. 2-2-3-3, which opens up a gamut of alternative possibility.

There is little doubt that Renton was utilising for football a formation it had taken from its other then winter game, shinty, The Vale, its nearest neighbours, having already done much the same thing, although not quite so explicitly. One sport had positionally been grafted onto another. But shinty is not just formational. The Ancient Game is one of movement of players into space and passing between individuals short, knocking-off, or long into that space to be run on to. It is a "passing-game", arguably the original one since its rules were even then two millennia old, and rugby, for example, had not yet been fully codified and seems to have been mostly ruck and scimmage with American football, with its movement after throws or hand-ons being formalised as from one static scimmage to the next, being the most similar, modern iteration. And it stands to reason that if shinty's game-shape were grafted so, as a result, had been the in-game interconnectivity that would replace the lack of it that individualism inevitably produces. It was that way round, "cooperation" displacing "vanity of the self". In other words the specifically Scottish passing-game that was universally noticed and rapidly became widely admired because it worked did not emerge fully-formed but had come as the result, the natural result, of the layering of one, long-practiced sport on top of a still formationally-fluid, new one. And that layering came not from literally bourgeois Queen's Park at all, despite the assertion of wholey Glasgow-centric FSM and similar, but from the old into the new people's, indeed proletarian game of the valley of the Dunbartonshire Leven, from The Vale initially and seemingly more fully still from specifically Renton. Nor would it be the last time - No Leven, No Scots-Game, No Soccer. - IPCW

(Alcock) & Marindin

In the period covered by SFHG there were numerous presidents of the Scottish Football Association but only four of the London-based, English equivalent.

The first, for a decade, was the rowing-solicitor, Ebenezer Morley, with his seemingly light, cooperative touch and considerable help at the organisation's inception in 1863 and again in 1866-7, when it was in danger of death in infancy, from his fellow lawyers and founders of Sheffield football and its FA. And the last was a Sheffield-man himself, another lawyer, Charles Clegg. He, as a player, had been one of the four non-southerners in the England team in the first international in 1872. He also remained a staunch advocate of amateurish throughout his life and thus, whilst he was largely responsible for England joining FIFA in 1905, Scotland, Wales and Ireland(Northern Ireland) following in 1910, and, after the gesture exit in 1919, the re-joining in 1924, a year after he took the reins, it was also he who then managed to take all four nations out once more. That would be in 1928 over potential shamateurism at the Olympics, a problem resolved by FIFA by the invention the following year of the World Cup, first played in 1930 but a competition the Home Nations could then not take part in for a further eighteen years.

And then there are the two in between, who are by a curious seeming coincidence both buried Scotland. In the case of Lord Kinnaird, the all-embracing story of whom is to found in the book by Andy Mitchell, Arthur Kinnaird - First Lord of Football, there was a straight-forward reason. Although born and brought up in London he was from a Scottish noble family and is buried on its estate at Kinnaird, overlooking the Tay between Perth and Dundee. But in the case of Sir Francis Marindin it is a little more convoluted.

Following his death at sixty-one in 1900 Sir Francis A. Marindin K.c.m.g. was buried, with Kathleen, his wife, who survived him by thirty-nine years, and other family in the grounds of the ruins of Old Crombie Church, by Torryburn on the north bank of the Forth in Fife. But he had been born in Weymouth in 1838, his father a vicar and, given the surname, of probably French Huguenot origin, his mother born in Beckenham but with a complicated, wealthy and, shall we say, not very salubrious Scottish background. In 1851 her Edinburgh-born father was listed as a land-owner but had been a plantation and slave-owner in the West Indies and with John Gladstone had then imported indentured labour to the region.

Sir Francis himself had when very young moved with the family to another parish in Somerset, from where he was sent to Eton, then the Royal Military Academy and from where at sixteen he joined the Royal Engineers. At seventeen he was serving in The Crimea and then from 1860 was A.D.C. and private secretary to the Governor of Mauritius, also serving in Madagascar. Indeed it would be also in Mauritius that he married the Governor's daughter, Elizabeth Stevenson, they themselves having, in 1865 and by then back in London after returning two years earlier, a single daughter.

And by then a twenty-five year-old Marindin, having re-joined his regiment in about 1863, had been involved, if not in the actual foundation of its football club then its very early days. And that involvement would continue for a decade including appearances in the first FA Cup Final in 1872 and again in 1874, the same year he assumed the FA Presidency. But he must have filled the role initially from something of a distance. Again in 1874 he had been posted to Harwich, there founding and at thirty-six playing for Harwich and Parkstone F.C.. It meant that from then until 1877, when he was seconded to the Board of Trade as an Inspector of Railways, stepping back from the army in 1879, day-to-day London operations were inevitably left in the hands of Kinnaird and Charles Alcock.

However, as a Railways Inspector Marindin was known for his "plain-speaking, coupled with a complete mastery of his subject and great discriminating capacity" so it seems unlikely as FA President he would have been any different. Indeed those characteristics may well have been responsible for the smoothness, with which Sheffield's was in 1877-8, albeit due to problems internal to the Steel City's own game, only initially partially subsumed, along with a number of its far more sensible rules, into London's, and twice over, in 1885 and 1888, the avoidance of conflicts, which might well have resulted in schisms with Northern and Midland clubs over professionalism. But it does not explain the allowing of Lane Jackson's 1882 attempt with the formation of Corinthian F.C. at sporting eugenics, unless, of course, Marindin was in agreement or simply, and somewhat bizarrely given his burial place, just anti-Scots. But then a biographer is quoted as saying,

"Refereeing the [FA] final in 1888 he entered the winners dressing room, West Bromwich Albion's, and asked if it were true that they were all Englishmen (in fact they all came from Staffordshire) and being assured it was so gave them the match ball which he was entitled to keep - political correctness then was unknown."

The judgement remains yours but West Brom had just beaten Preston North End with a Welshman and seven Scots in its team.

However, what he certainly did was to establish a high standard of game-officiation. He was in 1880 and from 1884 to 1890, the year he stepped down the FA Cup Final referee, so at that time still, with two umpires, one representing each team on the pitch, the arbiter in the stand. He was in his era considered to have a knowledge of the game's rules like no other but also perhaps conservative. Today's system of an on-pitch referee and two linesmen would be introduced from 1891.

As Marindin had stepped up to the FA Presidency Charles Alcock had already been there as Secretary for four years. Furthermore he would be still there for five years after "the Major" would stand down. And in that period of twenty-five years he is initially credited with the introduction of both international football and competitive club football in the form of the FA Cup, neither accolade being completely correct.

It is true that Alcock was the signatory to the challenges issued in 1870 for the five unofficial international matched that followed and for first official one in 1872, but then he should have been. He was FA Secretary, having in the former case just taken over. And whilst he would, again in the former case, be the England captain, both he and Secretary for the previous three seasons, Robert Graham, who remained on the FA Committee until 1871 were responsible for team selection.

Moreover, the selectors of the Scottish team were initially Kinnaird and James Fitzpatrick, the Quiet Baron, who was also captain in that first game and the one that followed. Kinnaird would captain in the third. And both Diasporan Scots would also be committee members with the impression thus being that it was very much a joint effort.

And with regard to the FA Cup there is a very good argument that it was a borrowed initiative. Already in 1867 in Sheffield the knock-out Youdan Cup had been played with the concepts of both extra-time and the Golden Goal introduced. Twelve local clubs had taken part. Fifteen would start the first FA Cup, thirteen local to the South of England, plus one from the Midlands and Queen's Park from Scotland. Then the next season the Cromwell Cup followed but with just four participants but then it had been restricted only to teams under two years old, perhaps a sign of rifts to come.

So where does that actually leave Alcock? On the one hand and conventionally he was a marketing genius, who took the game forward in leaps and bounds. But on the other perhaps he was not as innovative as some and perhaps he would like us to believe. Indeed there is perhaps an argument that he, whilst he had seen off, on- and off-field, the first potential challenge from the English North-East in the shape of Sheffield, he, and indeed Marindin, failed to do the same on-field from Scotland. And then he found the FA largely rendered permanently toothless off-field by the Midlands and North-West, once more of England, in the form of the Football League. The choice is yours but whilst in Scots terms it makes little or no difference perhaps the following quote from Alcock himself and 1891, so as the Renton-created, Scottish-Game was sweeping South, might help you. It is remarkable for its complete Anglo-centric myopia, indeed its pure gas-lighting:

"The perfection of the system which is in vogue at the present time however is in a very great measure the creation of the last few years. The Cambridge University eleven of 1883 were the first to illustrate the full possibilities of a systematic combination giving full scope to the defence as well as the attack"

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