Imagine what it was like before COVID put an end to football crowds and you were in your seat, the game was about to start, you had the programme you had bought on the way in, opened and saw a home team that read as follows:

 Blair, perhaps Baird, Hamilton, Wilson, McDonald, Rearey, Sneddon, Bill, perhaps Bell, Bruce, Roblo, perhaps Rollo, Armstrong and Brand

Where might you be - Gay Meadow in Arbroath, Borough Briggs in Elgin, at Cappielow to watch Morton or perhaps Palmerston Park in Dumfries?

But the fact is that, if you are reading this, you are far too young to have been at the game in question. It took place on 3rd May 1894 yet was not the first this club had seen. That had been eighteen months earlier, on 1st November 1892 but, whilst it was important from a sporting point-of-view, it was not pivotal as the one perhaps your itinerant great-grandfather might at a stretch have witnessed. 

However, let us start the build up to the big game slowly. We also know the names of a number of the players, who are said to have taken part in the first game. There was Gill and Smith, Livingstone and Dobbie, an officer, naval or army it is not clear, Armstrong once more, Simpson and Mackie, Ricketts and Caldecott, Stephens and Graham. There too there is a good smattering of Scots names but nothing like the density in the second game. And there is a simple reason. Whilst both matches were played under the auspices of the same club, indeed on the same venue, otherwise used for horse-racing, the first was rugby and the second football, won some say 6-0, others 5-0 against a side of locals with one reinforcement, perhaps not Jimmy but certainly a Greaves.

The club itself had been formed in 1891 at the instigation of Henry Jones Bird and W.H. Calvert and bore the title of The Athletic Club of the Shipyards of Nervion.  The ground was the racecourse between Lamiako and Leioa, which lie on the right bank of the river that runs through the city in question just before it reaches the sea.  The course is long gone but the club is not. It has just rebuilt its stadium turning the pitch through 90 degrees in the process. It lies as I write just now in a slightly lowly fifteenth place in La Liga and with a slight change of both player policy and name. It plays only Basques, although one of them at least has the surname Williams. It is known now still as Athletic with an "h" and not Atletic without one.

 But it might never have been. Whilst Scots play a bit of rugby on the side as the 1892 the Athletic Club of the Shipyards of Nervion team seems to show I suggest that the largely, perhaps entirely Scots team of 1894 was the one to return the club, therefore Bilbao  and indeed in time the whole Basque Country to the path of sporting righteousness, one which it has followed ever since. At the end of the century from the British community would emerge the Bilbao Football Club, whilst in 1898 Basques returning from Britain with the soccer contagion formed Athletic Club, retaining the British spelling, then in 1902 the two merged as Club Biscaya and in 1903  there was a final name-change - to what we have today.