This may well be the shortest piece on this blog so breath or rather read easy. Much has been written within and outwith Argentina about what here on Scots Football Worldwide is called The Crillo Fallacy. It is basically the myth that has grown up within that country that in it football, real Argentine football, began in about 1915, But what actually happened was a show of final Hispanisation, essentially in Buenos Aires, of a game that had already embedded itself there and in second city, Rosario, and had been played in both locations in organised form for the best part of a generation. In Rosario the first club, one which still exists today, Central, had been founded at Christmas 1889, the Liga Rosario of three "British" clubs and newly-formed Argentine one Atletico Argentino in 1905. Whilst in Buenos Aires the first, local iteration of the "Argentine" League had begun in 1891, had a year's break because of the death of its English-born president, and then restarted. Moreover. we know the instigators of those clubs and leagues and they were men like any other. In Rosario it was Colin Bain Calder, railway-man, first president of Central, and George Robb, teacher, both Scots. Whilst in BA is was Alex Lamont, clerk, and then in 1893 Lamont once more, Alex Watson Hutton, a teacher too, and Arnott Leslie, plumber, all also Scots, albeit that the Leslies, Arnott and his two, younger, also footballing brothers, indeed Argentine internationals were Argentine-born.

So what made for the 1915-ish change. First there was The Great War, which took a good number of young British-Argentinians back to serve and die for King and Country. Then there was immigration. It is estimated that between 1870 and 1930 four million people arrived to settle in Argentina, three million of them in the two and a half decades covered here. Of them 1.4 million came from Italy, about half from 1900 to 1910, and again about half that number from the Iberian peninsula, principally from Spain. But few came from areas in those countries where there was by then football - in the latter Andalusia, Murcia and first beginnings in Catalonia; in the former the cities, mostly in the north but amongst non-Italians. Few of the new-arrivals therefore would have had prior knowledge of the game, they did not bring it with them, and it was thus their children, who were introduced to the already established sport and took to it. It is much the same pattern as had occurred in Scotland half a century earlier with Irish immigration. It was not those who fled An Gorta Mor, The Great Famine, in the 1840s who took kicking the leather ball about but their children, Jimmy McGhee, James Kelly et all, the difference being that they assimilated and were, albeit not entirely smoothly, assimilated into what had existed before, the Scottish Game> Whereas specifically in Buenos Aires there would be differentiation and then still-existing discrimination sourced, I would suggest, one, in an Anglo-Argentine problem that has deep historical roots and, two, a failure to understand that Albion is not Britannia and certainly not Scotia.