This piece's title may sound like a "popular American music combo", indeed duo, but is named not for two people per se but twa' streets that connect twa' men. On 12th May 1905 perhaps the greatest footballer Scotland has ever produced, one of the stars of the World game as the 1920s became the 1930s, was born in a house on Hall Street, 16, Hall Street. And as he came into this World a middle-aged man and his family, all also locally-born, was probably already living on the same road, at Number 3. He was certainly there six years later, whilst the child with his family had moved round the corner to 3, Lennox St. Now, through the timing was certainly coincidental it might on the face of it not to be of any wider importance. There might have been several men in their forties  living with their families in other houses on the same street. Except that this man too had and still has a pivotal place in Scottish and World football.       

Hall is side street. It and Lennox met and meet at a cross-road. Opposite Hall was and is Leven and the quartet was and is completed by Main. Leven connects into Alexander, at the other end of which was the communal football ground, Tontine Park, "Subscription Park", now a small housing estate but once the home of the greatest team in the country, by which I mean not simply Scotland but the entire United Kingdom, and by extension given the era, the World.

The football team, eponymous with the industrial and thus overtly working-class village which had spawned it, was Renton FC. And it in 1888 had been crowned with defeats of it rival in Scotland and its peer from England had been unofficially crowned Champion of the World. Simultaneously it had been the source of the style of football that has in the interim come to dominate the way, in which modern football is played. The younger man would be an early, integral part in this process but the older one would be in there right at the beginning. In fact he was for a decade the captain of the team at the heart of revolution, with a good case to be made that as such and given the conventions of the day he was quite probably the instigator and certainly the on-field implementer.       

The older man was Archibald "Baldie" McCall, the younger Alex Jackson, the scorer notionally from the right-wing of a hat-trick in 1928 the 1-5 defeat of England by the Wembley Wizards. By then Renton FC had ceased to exist. The club that had been founded in late 1872 and played its first fixture the other side of the New Year had been dissolved in 1922. It is even said that Archie McCall, as a bricklayer to trade, worked on the houses that were built on the previously hallowed ground. Yet Jackson had played his junior football before that date. He may even, before in the very year of the old club's demise and at the age of seventeen joining nearby Dumbarton, have been amongst the last to tread the old turf and it seems inconceivable that old man would not have watched the younger man, advised, influenced, even coached the younger man to his literally avant-garde approach to right-wing-play. As for the old man, for one, who never left his home village, had played for his country but unlike many teammates never taken the English shilling, he was clearly held in high esteem. His death in 1936 at the age of 74 would be quietly recorded not just locally but in several, major English papers. Yet, whilst his knowledge and experience would have been invaluable to a talent as great as Jackson's and, indeed, to his elder brother, Wattie, who also played football at a good, professional level, there was perhaps a greater reward still, if he recognised it. It is that his football-thinking had not just kept Scotland at the game's peak for forty years but was also at the core of the spreading by reputation and often example of the Scot's game, his game, worldwide.