If you had a career in the top flight of Scottish football that lasted at least ten and perhaps a dozen years and took part in that time in four Scottish Cup Finals, winning two and losing two you might be content. You might be less happy as an old man and now a bricklayer to be said to have built houses on the football ground that had been your club's home for the whole of the time you were playing and captaining its team. You might perhaps have been puzzled that as a Scottish international you received one cap only, and that against Ireland, a 2-10 win. But then the competition for your position, left-back, was Walter Arnott, even through he were ageing. But then so were you. The difference between the two of you was only two months and not six years and two months as would be wrongly stated elsewhere in the  age of an Internet-thing you could not even imagine. It was a pity too that you never strode the international stage with your brother, who would win five times your number of appearances, three against England, a win a loss and draw, and score twice. But then as far as goals were concerned at least he was a forward. It was expected. And he was some player anyway.

But back to the player in question. He was born in 1861, the 21st July to be exact, not 1867. His father was George and his mother Catherine, but also for as long as he could remember, Mary. You see Catherine had produced four children, of whom he was the youngest, when in early 1862 she died. And on Boxing Day that same year her widowed husband had remarried and our footballer's younger brother, actually his half-brother, with two years and nine months between them, was the first child of the new couple.       

For much of their childhoods the two boys lived with the rest of the family at 177, Main St., Renton, at the north end of the village. The football ground, Tontine Park, was at the southern end. Team-mates lived within stone-throws in all directions so when football arrived in the village in 1873 with the brothers twelve and nine respectively there could never have been any shortage of kids and kick-abouts nor streets and spaces, in which to hold them. The result was that by the time the boys were young men of twenty-four and twenty-one respectively their team of all locals, literally a village team, had just won the Scottish Cup, the Glasgow Charity Cup and was, albeit unofficially, designated, not without reason, Champion of  the World having just defeated both the FA Cup holders, West Bromwich Albion, and the team that would be Double-winners the following season, Preston North End.

But that Renton team would soon break up, many of it players lured to England and playing professionally, that is for wages not expenses. But neither of our boys went, the older perhaps a little too old but the younger one by all measures a prime target. Why they remained is a mystery, especially since the older one would have plenty in his legs, playing into his mid-thirties and in 1895 and at the aged of almost thirty-four leads his club side out at a Cup Final, one of the losses albeit, and a last hurrah for the club and perhaps for him. It is not clear when he played his final game. He appears not to have been paying in 1896, although his brother was. It is, however, clear when he drew his last breath. The year was 1936. He died of heart disease in Dumbarton, described as a journeyman bricklayer, aged seventy-four, a widower and with his usual address given as 3, Hall Street, Renton, a couple of hundred yards from where he grew up, from where he had raised his family with equally local girl, Margaret Bell, and from Tontine Park.

So who was this person and why, for all that there is official confusion about even his basic life details, is he so important. His name is Archibald McCall. His half-brother was James. And there is every reason that Archie was the creator or, at the very least,  the facilitator of a footballing revolution. In the days before there were managers and coaches football teams developed their style collectively, based on individual talents blending, or played to a tactic that one or more of the team evolved. It had been true of the World's first international in 1872, when Robert Gardner as captain, indeed then captain of the Queen's Park team, from which the whole or, strictly, the whole bar one of the side that day had been drawn, introduced the 2-2-6 system. He had done it to suit the conditions, in which he with some help from the weather had partly been instrumental in creating, and to counteract the English opposition. Moreover it had worked, setting a precedent that has never changed. And it was this system of some control on the field being exercised by the captain that not only became the norm but can be reasonably assumed to have been the case at Renton. Two factors feed into this theory. The first is that it was never completely replicated. It became a standard, a style but not one not copied in every detail. There were variations, horses for courses. Yet it is also true to say it would also in considerably more than principle be adopted elsewhere, everywhere in Scotland and in places in England too. Of the latter Aston Villa was  probably the best, most immediate and highly successful example, with anther Renton product, James Cowan, at its centre, literally, and as its captain. And there were provisos. First was the allowance for individual personnel. Just because the new  recruit was a Vale man did not guarantee success. Second the hiring of specifically Renton players, McCall obviously excluded, did not guaranteed neither stylistic transfer. As case in point is James Kelly, the pivot of McCall's first Renton team. It worked at Celtic, albeit with a delay. It did not for the Scottish national team. There it was not Kelly but Cowan, who would literally be the game-changer. It would even be adopted abroad Uruguay being an example with Scots-born Juan Harley, Cathcart's John Harley, as its pivot and once more captain. Third is that, whilst for a decade Renton continued to produce players, who were playing the "new" way and therefore in demand, it could not go on forever. A comparison is perhaps the "Rangers' Way" a generation later, an evolution of the "Renton Way" but with the addition of built-in rotation around the centre-half, which was used by Bill Struth teams for the almost thirty-five years of his tenure. It was passed on through squads to squad by the coaching staff and operated on-field by successive captains, Struth being an ex-athlete, a man-manager, but never a footballer of any note yet petered out without his presence on retirement as guardian of the ethos. The parallel is that, whilst at Renton Archie McCall is definitely known to have been to have been one of the above, captain, he was perhaps all with his retirement having precisely the same effect, indeed the club's startlingly rapid decline.     

So to the crux. The suggestion here with regard to Renton is that it may well have been Archie McCall, who developed the "Renton Way". Equally it may have been a tactic that developed, in part or in whole, because of the players at the club from about 1883. It may even have been a pattern that came from a group of boys growing up together on the streets of the village, playing the game ad hoc and finding their own way to do so. But equally once those boys transferred their skills to the formal village club the likelihood is that someone on the field of play would have had ultimate responsibility of calling the shots, in American terms, calling the "plays," the "when to go and when not" moments with the captain, Archie McCall, the one to do it, the one to make it work. Yet, in firstly British but Anglo-centric and secondly Scottish but Glasgow-centric football history the story of Renton and therefore the McCalls and Archie McCall in particular remains, shall we say, under-told. Because fate and he, they chose never to step outwith Renton does not mean that whatever contribution was made, and made it surely was, one way or another, should be ignored or, worse still, misappropriated. It is perhaps time for a more candid analysis of the period, the events of it and McCall's, perhaps the McCalls' role in it. The problem with such a passage of time is how it might be done beyond mere supposition.