If you saw a team-sheet no matter at what level, which looked as the following one does, what would you think was the source of the players and were would the game be taking place?

Barber, Beach, Campbell, Elliott, MacBride, MacCallum, MacColl, Morris, Reid, Voel and White

And then there was question of when it took place.  It was in 1894 and in Callao, which is the main sea-port of Peru and the starting point of the Central Andean Railway. Once it was a separate town but now is a district of the country's capital, Lima, the centre of which is about six miles inland to the east and football reached, as so often in South America probably at some point in the 1880s, brought by British sailors and their impromptu games, whilst in port. However, certainly by the 1890s the game had been taken up by an increasingly permanent British population. Lima Cricket Club had been founded as early at 1859, the first recorded football match of its members was in 1892, a football section was added in 1893 and the club itself changed its name to the Lima Cricket and Football Club, some say in 1900, others in 1906. All of which fits in perfectly with in 1894 a challenge between a team representing Lima, a mixture of English, Spanish and perhaps a German names and one drawn from its port community, of which five, perhaps six appear to be Scots.

In fact there seems by the end of the 19th Century or shortly after to have been quite an established Scots community not just in Lima and Callao but in Lima in general. The story of Peruvian goalkeeper, George Forsyth, and the arrival of his family there is covered elsewhere, as is that of the shorter stay of the Welsh goalkeeper, Robert McMillan. There also the renowned treatise on the history and geography of the country written by a certain Alejandro, Alexander Garland. But the origins too of this team perhaps deserve a little more examination and the question asked as to whether they were passing through or there to stay with, admittedly no positive proof either way. Certainly and starting closest to home a Scots-born Hugo (Hugh) Ross Campbell had in the 1870s in Lima fathered at least four children with his presumably Peruvian, otherwise Spanish wife, Julia Villanueva, two of them boys and old enough in 1894 to be playing football. And John Campbell too. Similarly there are records of MacCallums, MacBrides, Reids and Whites similarly born of Scottish fathers again in Lima the period. There is even a son born to a Glasgow Elliott. And finally there is MacColl or perhaps McColl. It is a name that has already occurred not once but twice with regard to Hispanic football. The first time as Hugh McColl is between 1890 and 1893 in Seville in Spain as the captain of the city's British community team that played against Huelva in the first ever officially recorded game in that country. Then there is the Hugh McColl, who was the trainer to a scratch Santiago team when in 1894 it took on a similar one  from Valparaiso. And that was in Chile, a short hop of 2,000 miles down the South America coast. Could it possibly be that Glasgow-born McColl, who on returning to Britain set up a highly successful ship-repair business in Sunderland, might have been a footballing pioneer not just in Spain and Chile but also in Peru? It hardly seems possible but then you never know.