And when you are done looking at this site for the Scots input on football world-wide, here are two more.
For those who literally want to trace on the ground the local development of Scots and Scottish football in our own and other countries there is the newly available and ever-expanding site of:
The Scots Football Historians' Group
And on Scottish sports history in general but inevitably including fitba', see Andy Mitchell's inestimable:
Oz and its First First-Game
It was long assumed that the first association football, i.e. soccer, match to be played in Australia was on 14th August 1880 in Parramatta by Sydney. Certainly a game did take place there and on that day. It was between King's School and an eleven that had come together just ten days earlier and would soon be known as The Wanderers, as such the first club Down Under to have been recognised since. King's School, which still exists, is Anglican. John Fletcher, founder of The Wanderers, perhaps named for the London-based team that had won the English FA Cup in 1872, 1873, 1876, 1877 and 1888, was also London-born. It was a very English and school-based event. Fletcher himself was a teacher.
But there was another game, which predates the Parramatta match by fully two years, the account of which has since been unearthed in The Aldbury Banner and Wodonga Express of August 24th 1878 . Aldbury and Wodonga are neighbouring towns three hundred and fifty miles south-west of Sydney and why the game was covered there is intriguing because both lie fully forty miles from where the encounter actually took place, in then Germantown now Holbrook, New South Wales. The report itself is full, precise, illuminating and as follows:
GERMANTON.— On Saturday last a football match took place between the Germanton and Yarra Yarra football teams. The game was played under the rules of the English Football Association, the first time that such rules have been played in the colonies. This game has very much superseded the Rugby (Sydney) game in England, its chief feature being that the ball must on no occasion be touched with the hand. Everything thus depends on the clever working of the ball with the foot alone. It is played with eleven a side. Yarra won the toss, and kicked off against the wind, and a very even game ensued. Shortly after commencing Germanton handed the ball through their opponents’ goal, after sharply running it up from the middle of the field. Yarra claimed a foul on account of the “hand,” and consequently the goal was disallowed, to the evident dissatisfaction of some of the Germanton players. Jas. McLaurin then dribbled the ball well up the side, and passed to Morrison (the Yarra captain) in the centre, who brought it well into the mouth of the Germanton goal; and there the Yarra forwards, closing in, fairly forced the ball through the posts, thus scoring the only goal in the match. On changing ends at half-time the Yarra men with the wind behind them, had the best of the game, though some good runs were made for Germanton by Bond and Power, the ball being brought once by these players right up to the Yarra goal, which was saved only by a brilliant bit of play by Muntz, the Yarra goal-keeper, who throughout played a fine steady game. No other score was made till time was called, the game resulting in a win for Yarra by one goal to nil. Besides the names mentioned, Cooper and Bentley deserve mention for their back play for Germanton, the kicking of the captain being most effective; while for Yarra, Bryant forward played hard and well, and the two small half-backs (McLaurin*), though overweighted, played very pluckily.
It reads as if it is written by someone who, firstly, knows the game at first hand and by a Yarra Yarra man. And we know more, including the teams:
Germanton—T. Bond, M. Purtell, W. Purtell, Power, Brennan, Hays, Bentley, Lyne, Koffman, Parnell, and Cooper (captain).
Yarra Yarra—H. Muntz, G. McLaurin, John McLaurin, F. Elliott, Thos. Bousfield, H. Bryant, T. Clydsdale, James McLaurin, R. A. McLaurin, T. Love, and T. M. Morrison (captain).
Germanton has been originally settled by a John Purcell, sic. Purtell, a probably Irish-born, ex-convict, and the Pabst family from Germany. Indeed, two of Purcell sons, Maurice and William, are the full-backs in the Germanton team, along with several other probable Irishmen. However, the winning Yarra Yarra team is quite different. It played the then Scots' way - 2-2-6. Its captain, probable tactician and possible report author is a Morrison. Four of the eleven are McLaurin's, one an Elliott, one a Love and and one a Clydesdale, in fact also a McLaurin. And the man in the background, the man pictured above, is the owner of the Yarra Yarra station, which is still to be found about ten miles west of Holbrook; a certain James McLaurin.
James McLaurin has been born in Dunoon in 1821. He would die in 1891 and in the meantime build up a number of substantial farms, of which Yarra Yarra, which he bought in 1860, would seem to have been the largest. He had arrived in Australia aged eighteen and become one of the earliest settlers first on the Murray River. Then at thirty-one in 1852 he had married Ann Sparrow in Melbourne but she had died the following year and in 1857 in Tumut, New South Wales, he had remarried, his bride, Isabella Rankin from Inverness, with whom he was to have five sons and three daughters. And so it was that four of those boys, James, Gordon, John and Robert, christened Archibald, plus a nephew Thomas, were in the team that day, a team probably made up additionally of farm-hands, some who may have been working convicts. Thomas was twenty-six at the time, would marry locally the following year, have seven children and die in 1931 in Scone, NSW. James was, however, just twenty, Robert eighteen, whilst Gordon and John were sixteen and fourteen respectively, which would explain why in the match-report the two youngest were described as "overweighted", not overweight but the very opposite.
The fixture itself seems never to have been repeated, albeit that again in the match-report it was clearly seen as the first time the Association rules had been used "in the colonies", the boys would have remained part of the Scottish Diaspora with the flow of word from home and all the brothers continued to stay in the area. On their father's death Gordon and John, until their deaths in 1917 and 1927 respectively, would go on to run other nearby estates also owned by the family. whilst Robert in 1993 would take over Yarra Yarra itself from John, who that year had passed away at the age of just thirty-five. And both John and Robert would be buried, the latter with his wife on his death in 1945, in Yarra Yarra Station's own cemetery, a place to be recognised and cherished by Australian, Scots and global football fans alike.
