It has long but not always been the contention of this blog that the birth-place of the modern game, of modern football, was Scotland, specifically Renton in Dunbartonshire's Vale of Leven. It has also always been the contention that it was by far mainly Scots who took the game to the World, a conclusion come to not out of pure nationalism but fact - to date and probably now definitively forty-five facts, the number of those globally national implants to have been traced.

The identification of Renton is due to the spotlight thrown by the events of the late winter and Spring of 1888 - the winning of the Scottish Cup, indeed the defeat of all-comers and the crowning of it, essentially a village team, as "World Champions". The where and the how have been well documented, not least here. But the why is more difficult. The assumption had been that, as was the normal convention of the era, tactics were the fiefdom of the captain, usually a defender, and in 1888 he was the left-back Archie McCall, "Baldie" to his pals. But Baldie McCall remains an enigma, one of two. Here was a man who may have held the key to his club's success yet, whilst the team around him, even the reserves, were stripped of talent, he played on at Tontine. Whilst his team-mates went South to a variety of English clubs as the first of the first wave of real "Scotch Professors", (that is ones who knew how to play the game a lot rather than the earlier and far smaller wavelet who knew some but because of, if nothing else, their young age not that much), Baldie never left the village, dying there in 1936.

In part the reason for no English club coming in for him may have been that in 1888 he was already twenty-seven, today at peak but then considered almost veteran. Yet he was not to hang up his boots until 1895 and, even if the legs were not they had been, would not his coaching potential been enough for an offer from across the border. But none came or, at least, none was accepted, which begs the question, whilst he might have been the implementer on-field, was there someone else, to whom credit were given. It has been a question that has troubled for some time for there was another figure that potentially filled the bill as the intellectual motivator of the birth, the Renton Revolution. However, thoughts on him had been pushed back until recently reactivated by the inestimable Andy Mitchell. He send me a simple message saying,

"I ..... think that there is a very strong resemblance between your top image and the man at back right in the final photo."

The man in question is Alick Barbour. The image is a photo I had. The photo is one Andy had come across. And, whilst looking at the images whilst I am not sure Andy is right, it set me thinking and re-examining. In 1885 Barbour was part of the first and second of the Renton teams that from that year was to win the Glasgow Cup four years in succession. He was also capped, against Ireland with Bob Kelso, and therefore one of the first of the new generation from the club to stand out. But then he was also one of the older players, born in 1862 so only months younger than Baldie. An inside-forward he normally played on the right but could play left-side and elsewhere as well. In the 1885 Cup Final he was on the right-wing with the then nineteen year-old  James Kelly inside him, this whilst working as a labourer in the local dye-works. Moreover, whilst playing the Renton cup games he was for four months also turning out across the country with Dundee Our Boys but on what basis is unclear.  How much demand for a dye-works labourer on Tayside is open to question but then, perhaps, it was because he already had a reputation as a trainer and tactician and had been recruited as such. Certainly he would generate one later when, after a second spell in Dundee in 1887-8, he went South to Bolton, Nelson, Glossop and Nottingham Forest.

But in between Dundees he did return to Renton for the the two seasons from 1885 to 1887 and it is those couple of years that are intriguing, not least because he was also appointed club-captain. In other words he and not Archie McCall was for those two seasons in the position to call the shots both off and on the pitch at precisely the time the club was still playing 2-2-6 but beginning to develop its Cross; the 2-2-1-5 that , albeit not immediately, was to prove so successful, indeed revolutionary. Whilst it was to provide the starting-point for the addition, he perhaps it, of a mid-field to link existing defence and attack and thus for the game as we know it now, there would de a delay. It did not work in season 1886-7, and when it did with now Kelly dropping back and Harry Campbell and Neil McCallum, respectively five and six Barbour's junior, coming in as younger legs under McCall's eye, Alick would watch events unfold from the other side of the country. 

Yet perhaps he did it with a wry smile and some magnanimity, an example I hope to follow thus. Let us say, and as such leave it, that without Alick Barbour's probable tactically intellectual input followed by Archie McCall's on-field practicality the Renton Revolution would not have happened and we should be thankful that it did. Otherwise, God help us, we might all be playing and watching not today's silk but having to endure the chaffing of the sporting equivalent of sackcloth.