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:
There are two games that must have been etched on the soul of Alf Ramsey, perhaps even driven him. The first was on 25th November 1953. He was thirty-three years old. It was his thirty-second cap. There would be no more. It seems a little harsh. It depends on who was marking whom. The Hidegkuti hat-trick must have been a product of failures by centre-half, Blackpool's Harry Johnson, a year older still than Ramsey and another never to pull on an England shirt again. The Bozsik goal too might have been down to him also but the Puskas brace is another matter. It depends on how England was marking. If it were the Scottish system of right-back on left-wing then it was captain Billy Wright's fault. If it was the old English system, long discredited, of right-back on inside-left it was Ramsey's and that looks to have been the way. Billy Wright would win another fifty caps.
The second game had been on 29th June 1950. It was in rather more exotic surroundings of the Estádio Independência in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Billy Wright was captain that day too for his thirty-first cap. And the goal, for there was only one goal, was scored by the opposition centre-forward, Joe Gaetjens so that day the centre-half seems to have been to blame. He was Laurie Hughes of Liverpool and he would only have one more cap. And that too seems a little harsh. It was a diverted shot by the opposition left-half from twenty-five yards that Ramsey, winning his seventh cap, could only watch.
The first game was, of course, England versus Hungary at Wembley, Hungary captained by the great Puskacs himself. The match was a humiliation. But then so was the second with the captain of the opposition that day, no doubt by his own admission not of Puskac's standard as a player, and the team manager, through injury when young never a player at any high level, quite possibly derived yet more satisfaction. The captain, at right-half, with the arm-band just for the day as a special honour and no doubt with a special fire not in his belly but his soul, was marking Stan Mortensen. And he clearly played a "blinder" of sorts. Despite spending, it is said, eighty-five percent of the the match in the opposition's half Mortensen and England failed to score. And the opposing captain even instigated the goal. He took a throw-in, the receiving player, Bahr, shot from twenty-five yards and it was deflected in by his team's centre-forward, Gaetjens. The team was, of course, the USA. Its captain was Ed McIlvenny, twenty-five years old, born on 21st October 1924 in Greenock, Scotland, who was still British, would go on to sign for Manchester United and end his days in Eastbourne.
However, behind events on the field there is another twist off it. The man, who had made McIlvenny captain for the day, was the American manager. His name was Bill Jeffrey. He had been coaching "soccer" at Pennsylvania's Penn State University for twenty-five years and he would retire just two years after Brazil. In the meantime in 1941 he had been a founder member of the National Soccer Coaches Association of America and in 1948 its President, whilst before Penn State he worked as a mechanic on the railways. And before even that, injured badly enough not to be able to pursue a career in football but with a football education already in place, he had arrived in America in 1910, aged it is said twenty but actually eighteen.
It was this football education, this Scottish football education, that he would spend most of the rest of his life passing on for Bill Jeffrey had been raised in Leith, at 7, Hawthornvale to be precise. Born in 1892 he had grown up with Scottish football reborn as the 19th Century became the 20th, Hibernian taking the title in 1903. Moreover with Scotland not in Brazil, although specially invited, an invitation the SFA foolishly refused to accept, not only would McInvenny have seen himself as representative but Jeffrey as well. Perhaps they even shared the "special fire", one which coach Jeffrey, if for that one day only, in making McIlvenney captain might have hoped would have been transmitted to all his players. And you know, miracles do sometimes happen!.