Sometimes tiny fragments of information come together to tell a possible story and the coming of football to Paraguay is one of these instances. In 1856 a young army doctor was posted, quite for what reason is unknown and perhaps best left that way since it was by the British War Office to the Rio de la Plata, the mouth of the River Parana between today's Uruguay and Argentina. He had previously served in the Crimean War and been the head of a Division of Military Health and at some point between 1856 and 1862, whilst in Corrientes, the Argentine town, now city, on the mid-reaches of same Parana where Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay meet, he was asked by the then President of Paraguay to organise a Military Health Corp for his army. The doctor accepted, which led to him remaining in the land-locked, South American country for the remainder of his life. He would die in the Paraguayan capital, Asuncion, in 1916 after a life spent not just in medicine but banking, railways and diplomacy.

The doctor's name is Stewart. Born in 1830 he had been twenty-six on arrival in Argentina and the clue to his origins is in the name. William Stewart was a product of both Edinburgh and Glasgow universities but he had been born in the wee village of Grandtully on the River Tay in Perthshire, halfway between Aberfeldy and Pitlochry. In Paraguay he would marry one of that country's wealthiest woman and in 1887 be the lead in the purchase of its nascent railways by the Central Paraguay Railway Co., a company registered in England.

However, William Stewart was unlikely to have been a footballer himself. In 1872 he would have been forty-two and in any case long-gone from Scotland. Yet, whilst it is generally agreed the beautiful game came to Paraguay's Spanish-speaking population only in the first years of the 20th Century its best history mentions also it having been played in the country as early as 1886.  Specifically it was an encounter in a small, country town between "English" railway workers, taking a field built by themselves as"Everton, and locals. That town is Borja, now San Salvador, a stop on the extension of the original Asuncion-Villarica line to Encarnacion, a Paraguayan town still further upstream on the Parana from Corrientes.

As is usual in South America "English" should be read as "British", indeed often when railways are involved, "Scottish", remembering that the owner then of the railway was himself a Scot. And there is one further, little snippet. In the inestimable Andy Mitchell's "The Men Who Made Scotland - the definitive Who's Who of Scottish Football Internationals" he recounts the brilliant but brief playing-career of Robert Main Christie, who would in 1903 also become President of the SFA. Bob Christie was born in 1865 in Dunblane. He was a Perthshire man, coincidently or not, like Stewart. At fifteen in 1880 he was a founder of Dunblane F.C. before he first went to Edinburgh University, playing in its team, and then on, to train as an architect, to Glasgow. There he joined Queen's Park, from 1883 to 1886 played for it on the left-wing and at left-half. Within a year he was selected for Scotland, a 1-0 home win over England. He was just 18 years old, remains Scotland's third youngest player ever and seemed set for a long and successful international-career.

Yet it was not to be. The following year a twisted knee left him sitting out much of the 1884-5 season, and it was a second knee twist that in 1886 meant at the age of just 21 the end of his top-flight involvement. He was, however, still able to play at a level, returning to Dunblane for the 1886-7 season and again from 1889 to 1892. but it what he did in between that catches this eye. Bob Christie would be a qualified chartered surveyor and become an architect. The latter is in particular not a quick qualification. As I write my son has one more year to go to achieve it at Edinburgh University and he is already twenty-five. It is therefore probably safe to assume that Christie too was still "working towards" when he, it seems, left Scotland for two years. Moreover, he is said to have spent that time in none other than Paraguay, where he is said to have regained fitness. The questions are why South America and where. An educated guess might be to work for Stewart's  Central Paraguay Railway, as an already qualified surveyor, perhaps of the new line. And there in Borja on the route-to-come he, whilst perhaps not the direct catalyst, gave further impulse to or was even a participant in the country's, arguably even chronologically the continent's, first tastes of the game he had so distinguished back in Scotland on the field and would again do so off it on return.