This year, 2024, is the 100th anniversary of the Swedish top-flight, the Allsvenskan. And there is a not unconnected, wee tale of before it even existed that has been pointed up by my esteemed colleague in that country, Orjan Hansson and which concerns one of Sweden top-teams, Kalmar FF. In the 2023 season, Swedish football played in the summer months, it finished sixth.

In 1914 a ship laden with rice docked at Kalmar. It is a Baltic, port city on the South-eastern mainland opposite the large island of Gotland. The rice itself was destined for a mill in the town but whilst the vessel was harbour an invitation was issued by one of the local football clubs, Gothia, to the crew to play a friendly football match. And the invitation was accepted. There is even a press report of it. The "Englishmen" chose to play into the sun and wind in the first half. It was clearly a mistake. By half-time the Swedish club was 3-0 up. There was in the second-half a home-goal disallowed for off-side but the Swedes were able to score once more, final result 4-0, and all in front of six hundred spectators.

Gothia already clearly knew what they were doing on the football-pitch. Founded in 1910 at IF Gota it had failed to get membership of the Swedish Sports Federation because of name clash with two other existing members but had in 1912 got round that by simply adding an "i" and changing to IF Gothia. Then in 1918 it would be decided that there were too many major football teams in Kalmar, four was reduced to two with Gothia becoming Kalmar Idrotts Salskapp for a decade before a name-change in 1927 to Kalmar FF, and playing the regional league until 1949, when it joined the top-flight for the first time. 

As to the boat, from which the crew had come. It was the S.S. Glenfinlas, built in 1905/6 on Clyde-side, owned at the time by Glasgow's George Street's Easton, Greig & Co , finally being broken up in 1953 and mainly used on routes to the Indian sub-continent and the Far East. On this occasion the rice had been picked up at Rangoon in Burma, on 14th March the vessel had docked at Colombo in Sri Lanka, arriving at its final destination, captained by Glaswegian, Robert Edwards, six weeks later on 30th April. It would then stay for a fortnight before sailing, unladen, back to Britain, its destination said to be to Burntisland in Fife

The Glenfinlas, as even its Gaelic name would imply, was a thoroughly Scottish ship with the likelihood that its crew would also have been Scots. So, despite "Englishman", as ever, being referred to in the match-report the reality is that the visiting team that day was the same, which makes subsequent events more interesting as one of the visitors clearly stood out. Some sixty plus sixty years later one of the Swedes, Hjalmar Sivgard, who may well have played that day as a twenty-year-old said that one of the "Englishmen", whose name was Shaw, was,

"the best football player to appear in Kalmar. A superb dribbler and totally superior as a  main player."               

Moreover, it then seems that the same Mr Shaw was rapidly recruited by the club  to coach it, albeit briefly. Whilst the boat only remained in dock for the next two weeks and it and Shaw returned to Britain initially, he is said immediately to have bought himself out and returned to Kalmar to continue to coach at least until the outbreak in August of The Great War, so perhaps two months.

Yet, hostilities meant that Shaw again returned to the UK. The Glenfinlas itself would be converted into an armed merchant-man with a gun mounted on its rear-deck. However, this is not quite the end of the story. First, Sivgard also said that Shaw returned to Kalmar after the War, possibly not due to football but the enduring attraction of a young, Swedish lady, this time not staying. Second, there is the matter of the Glenfinlas itself.  It remains a very Scottish ship with the distinct possibility that, with Shaw not being an uncommon name in the Central Belt, he not being English at all but another of ours, a Jock, bitten by the football bug at home, with skills developed in the Scottish game and taking them, if not in this case the contagion itself, to other climes. And there is also Kalmar FF as a post-script. Sadly in this centennial year, the season just coming to an end, 2024, it dropped from sixth to second-bottom of the Allsvenkan and has just been relegated. Perhaps it should once again be looking at what boats have just docked.