Estonia's top league, the Meistriliiga, consists of ten clubs. It was founded in just 1992, so thirty years ago, but football in the country is far older. It has been played for well over a century. Of the current top clubs all but a couple are of modern vintage, about the same age as the league itself. And again of those same clubs half are in the capital, Tallinn but it is one of they that stands out. In fact it is the newest addition to the numbers, Tallinna Kalev, Tallinn-based as the name implies but, whilst re-established in 2002, in origins the best part of two decades older than any of its rivals.

It was formed as Meteor in 1909, changing its name to Kalev in 1911. It was an original member of the Estonian Football Championship in 1921 and title-winner in 1923, 1925 and 1955 and its founders were said to be two students. But clearly neither knew too much about the game so they turned to someone that did. In fact he became the team's first coach and ordered its first kit, blue shirts and white shorts.

And if the kit colours have a familiar ring it is not coincidence. That first coach John Stormonth Urquhart and in the histories he is described as a Scottish flax merchant. Indeed by then "flax merchant" he might have been but given his probable far humbler beginnings it seems unlikely. A John Urquhart, John Stormonth sometime Stormont Urquhart, was born in 1868 in Backwynd in Forfar, the second, apparently illegitimate son of Agnes Urquhart. His elder brother, Alexander, was two years older and had the surname seemingly of Patterson. His mother was then working in the linen industry, later recorded as a domestic servant, and it is into more or less the same textile trade that John entered, moving to Arbroath in doing so. It was there that on the last day of 1890 he, aged twenty-two, married eighteen year-old Wilhelmina Brown, he listed as a flax-dresser, she a flax spinner, having spent his teenage-years in the second Golden Age of the Scottish game. Football came to Forfar in about 1880 and Arbroath a couple of years earlier still 

And ten years later both he and Wilhelmina were still in Arbroath. But not, it seems a decade later still. At some point after 1906 and the birth of their fifth child and only son, also John Stormonth, in nearby Montrose it seems the family had moved briefly to Estonia. By then John Snr was a not a merchant but a Flax Inspector.  And it was still as such that he was described back in the same town in 1921, where the deaths are recorded of one of the daughters, named Agnes presumably after her grandmother, and later that same year of Wilhelmina herself. 

John Urquhart Senior himself would outlive his wife by thirty years dying in Strathcathro Hospital in Brechin in 1951 at the age of eighty-three and was buried in Arbroath at the Western Cemetery. On his death certificate he is still given as a flax inspector, albeit retired, but, whilst it makes his described business status in Tallinn probably somewhat exaggerated it in no way diminishes his role in the introduction of football to the Baltic States. In Estonia at least he showed them how to play and from the very beginning to do so the Scottish way.