WITH Argentina winning the World Cup for the third time, under superstar captain Lionel Messi, let us not forget the key role that Scots played in this success.
Beyond current Argentine player Alexis MacAllister, whose ancestry can be traced back to Fife, it was two Scots, Alexander Watson Hutton and Alex Lamont, who were responsible for developing the game in the country. Indeed, Watson Hutton is considered “the father of Argentine football”.
Born in the Gorbals in 1853, he emigrated to Argentina in 1882 where he taught at St Andrew’s Scots School in Buenos Aires and then went on to found the Buenos Aires English School.
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In 1891, the Association Argentine Football League was established by another Scot, Alex Lamont, who was headteacher at St Andrew’s school. It is recognised as the first football league in the country, as well as outside the British Isles. It lasted only one season and was won by a team of Scots from St Andrew’s.
Two years later Watson Hutton established the Argentine Association Football League and restarted the tournament. In 1898 his school formed a football team which went on to become the most decorated team in Argentine football until its dissolution in 1911.
So, when one witnesses the ecstatic scenes in Argentina, spare a thought for the pivotal role played by Scots in that nation’s footballing success.
Alex Orr
Edinburgh
I WRITE this in a France awash with round-ball tears, but as a Scots-Irish MacAllister strode the park on Sunday and a Border Brown scored the opener in 1986, perhaps it is time for a little debt recognition from the victors. No Scots, no Argentine football. For the first 20 years of its existence we, Scottish-born and diasporan, made it and ran it.
Alex Watson Hutton is known there as the father of its game. Alex Lamont was it its first administrator, Arnot Leslie its early Alex Ferguson. Two of his brothers played for the first and second Argentine national teams. John Anderson was the Albiceleste’s first captain in an eleven with a total of six of us. There were the Buchanans, even earlier but same Border Browns, six of whom would play for their adopted country; John Caldwell, whose family still stay in Glasgow, and others.
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And that is just Buenos Aires. In the second city of Rosario, Messi’s hometown, its two teams are Newells and Central – first president Colin Bain Calder, born Dingwall, and early star player his brother-in-law, Miguel Green, family from East Calder.
But to the point. As payment for the debt can we have the World Cup on display for a week a year at Hampden? That is before the contest restarts in North America, with the US’s first ever World Cup team including five Scots and a Scots manager reaching the semi-final to be defeated by ... Argentina. But then that’s another true story.
Iain Campbell Whittle
Achiltibuie
JEREMY Clarkson’s views on our First Minister and Meghan Markle are only part of an ongoing campaign of vilification against these women – planned behind the scenes by the establishment and given a public platform by the gutter press.
There is no doubt that the unlovely Jeremy did not suddenly commit himself to paper off his own bat. The powerful forces that control most of the press in the UK will have used his reputation for outrageous statements as a handy conduit for getting their own views across. All carefully choreographed.
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It speaks volumes that, instead of the subtle and insidious propaganda historically associated with the British state, they feel free these days to openly use the likes of Clarkson to push their agenda. All nuance is gone. Why should they bother with subtlety in the current political climate, when after more than four decades of right-wing government there exists such a hate-filled, reactionary environment – evidenced by Brexit and the promotion of racist war mongers to high political positions in Westminster?
The British state has a history of killing off its opponents before subjecting their reputation and memory to vile propaganda, hoping to justify government action in retrospect. I hope the disgusting diatribes against Nicola Sturgeon and Meghan Markle are not precursors to anything more sinister.
Taking on the establishment is a dangerous game. Remember Willie McRae and Dr David Kelly.
Jim Butchart
via email
MY letter in last weekend’s Sunday National stated that John MacLean was appointed Soviet Consul in England, when it should, of course, have been Scotland. Big difference.
The Soviet Union also prescribed a John MacLean commemorative stamp on the anniversary of his birth, in 1979. Can we expect the UK anti-Soviet union to publish one in the anniversary of his death, which was on St Andrew’s Day, November 30, 1923?
Donald Anderson
Glasgow
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