Sometimes subjects or even observations become linked seemingly by serendipity. One recently was when the inestimable Andy Mitchell of Scottish Sporting History realised that his own grandfather might have had a link with El Yoni, John Harley, the figure revered in Uruguay as the creator of the country's style of play. Harley and the young Mitchell were both born and brought up in Cathcart. In fact they were born in the same year in the same place and Andy had some school photographs of his grandfather in the loft that he thought he might look at. And when he did loe and behold in not one but series of prints there was not just his forebear but John Harley as well, in the same class in the same public, in the Scots sense, school. More over they were clearly pals. The young Harley was  "Johnny".

Now this second, little moment of personal illumination was nothing like as astounding as that of Andy's grandpa. But it was the same realisation of a possible connection and again it had something to do with Andy. For the television programme, Bringing Football Home, he had done some digging on the footballing background of the narrator Dougray Scott and had revealed that his uncle, in fact several of his uncles on his mother's side, the Dougrays, had been top-flight referees. They had even officiated at Scottish Cup Finals and internationals. Moreover they had done it from Nitshill, a place with an always intriguing name, enough certainly to check what footballers it might have produced. 

And there were some, or rather at least one as this quote from a contemporary record indicates.

"Football players home from England during the closed season, enjoying their £208 a year, were an attraction for the boys, and none more so than Jock McMahon, wearing his cup medal won by Manchester, prior to the whole outfit being suspended Sine Die by the E.F.A. for paying more than allowed by rule."

So a Nitshill boy, Jock i.e. John McMaho,  playing for a Manchester team that had then got itself banned for life had won a cup medal and was showing it off in his home village. There could be only event this referenced. The 1904 Cup Final between Manchester City and Bolton Wanderers and won by the former 1-0. the goal-scorer inevitably the great Welsh forward and fighter for union rights, Billy Meredith. Furthermore there was a John McMahon in the team that day at right-back, who had joined the club from Preston North End, would make a hundred starts for the Sky Blues between 1902 and 1906, often at centre-half,  before moving on to Bury, then retirement in 1908/9 and is called by Wikipedia "Johnny McMahon (English footballer)" but was neither. He was a Scot, a Jock in every sense, raised presumably in the pit-village of Nitshill, starting his career at Clyde and dying in 1933 but with as yet nothing much know about him in-between except from a cigarette-card how he looked.