It's amazing what can turn up. This silver buckle, attached to its original belt, was presented in 1865 by the 14th Earl of Eglinton for competition by cricket clubs in Cunninghame, north Ayrshire. I believe this was the world's first knock-out cricket tournament, a distinction which has apparently not previously been recognised. 
   In fact the Earl presented three prizes that summer: a silver ball for the winners, the silver-mounted belt for the runners-up, and a cricket bat for third place. Having added the belt to my collection following a chance find on eBay, I decided to look into its history, and the wider sporting patronage of the Earls of Eglinton in the Victorian era. 

It was first announced in the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald on 13 May 1865: 'CRICKET - The Earl of Eglinton has resolved to come out as a patron of this fine manly game and has intimated to the cricketers in the district of Cunninghame that he intends giving them three prizes, to be competed for annually.'
   The prizes attracted five local cricket clubs to enter the competition. It was an awkward number for a knock-out competition, but the ties were drawn and in the first round Ardeer beat Kilmarnock Junior on 3 June, then Kilwinning Monkcastle beat Kilmarnock Winton on 17 June, while Irvine Eglinton were given a bye. In the second round, effectively the semi-final, Irvine Eglinton beat Ardeer on 1 July while Kilwinning Monkcastle received a bye.
   This set up a final which was played on 22 July at the Earl's own cricket pitch at Eglinton Castle. Kilwinning Monkcastle took the honours, and the silver ball, by beating Irvine Eglinton by 45 runs after two innings.

There was still a need for a third place match, and Ardeer won the silver-mounted bat on 19 August, defeating Kilmarnock Winton by 17 runs.
   The Eglinton prizes for Cunninghame clubs continued each year until 1882 when the silver ball was won by Beith. by this time, there was no mention of a silver belt for the runners-up, and the current whereabouts of the silver ball is (I believe) unknown. 
   Hence the little belt and buckle, which I now own, appears to be Scotland's oldest surviving cricket trophy. There were earlier cricket cups in England, but only for direct competition between two teams. I can find no earlier instance of a knock-out tournament. 
   The original winners of the belt, Irvine Eglinton, had been founded in the town in 1858, and not surprisingly the club's patron was the Earl of Eglinton himself. The club was one of the leading sides in Ayrshire in the 1860s but had a chequered history, having to bounce back from losing its ground to coal mining in 1867 and then became homeless again in 1874, after which it was wound up.
   The 14th Earl was clearly a cricket enthusiast and delighted at the success of his tournament, so in 1867 he went one bigger and provided a trophy for the whole of Ayrshire (or more formally for Carrick, Kyle and Cunninghame). He had announced the previous summer that he would offer a silver cup, value £40, and the first edition of the competition attracted eleven entries. The first winners were Irvine Eglinton, defeating Ayr in the final. In succeeding years the winners always came from Ayr until Ayr CC won it three years in a row to take permanent possession of the trophy in 1875. It was in fact three trophies, a silver gilt claret jug with two goblets, all in the same velvet-lined box.
   The Eglinton Cup, still held by Ayr CC, came back into public view in 2017 when it took pride of place at a Scottish cricket exhibition within the Football Museum at Hampden Park. 

At that time, the Eglinton cup was hailed as the world's oldest cricket trophy but I think I can now dispute that claim by two years (although whether a silver belt can claim to be a trophy is another question).

While the 14th Earl, who died in 1892 aged 50, can be credited with creating the first cricket tournaments, it has to be said he was a sporting lightweight compared to his father, who had an extraordinary record of patronage that endures to this day.
   The 13th Earl of Eglinton (1812-1861) is perhaps best known for his extravagant Eglinton Tournament which he hosted in 1839. However his lasting legacy was in sport. Described as 'the generous patron of every manly exercise', over the following two decades until his death he lavished his wealth on a huge variety of prizes which encouraged sporting competition in Scotland and far beyond.
   His personal passion was horse racing and he kept a large racing stud, the greatest exponent being Flying Dutchman which won the Derby and the St Leger in 1849. The Earl also provided the Eglinton Cup at the Curragh racecourse in Kildare while he was Viceroy of Ireland.
   In bowls, he donated the Eglinton Gold and Silver Bowls for clubs in Ayrshire (1854) and the magnificent Eglinton Silver Jug (1857) for annual competition between Ayrshire and Glasgow. These are all still competed for today.
   In curling, he presented the Eglinton Jug in 1851 for Ayrshire clubs and it is also still going as a vibrant competition.
   In golf, the Earl was a founder of Prestwick Golf Club in 1851 and provided the silver belt which was won on the course by Willie Park at the very first Open Championship in 1860. It continued to be the prize for the winner of the Open each year until Tom Morris junior won it outright in 1871, and it was replaced with the famous claret jug. The belt now resides in the R&A World Golf Museum in St Andrews.

Those are the best known Eglinton trophies but he also provided a silver cup for Glasgow Regatta, a silver cup for shooting by the West of Scotland Volunteers, and a gold belt and quiver for Irvine archers. He founded the Eglinton Hunt and gave the Eglinton Hunt Cup to Ayr races. What is more, Eglinton Castle was superbly equipped with a rackets hall, a cricket pitch, a curling pond and a croquet lawn. Most of the castle is now ruins in the country park, but the rackets hall is a rare survivor, the oldest indoor sports building in Scotland.
   Overall the patronage of the 13th Earl of Eglinton helped to encourage Scottish sport in many fields. After his death, the 14th Earl was less extravagant but he still made a key contribution to cricket and I am delighted to have discovered one of his original prizes. 

A chance purchase of an old tankard on ebay led me to delve into the history of one of the classic football television shows, Quiz Ball. It ran from 1966 to 1972 on the BBC and can be considered a forerunner to A Question of Sport which opened in 1970.
   My pewter tankard is annoyingly lacking in detail, as it simply reads 'BBC TV Quiz Ball, Challenge Match 1972'. It turns out there were actually two challenge matches that year, and I cannot find any report of who won them and who might have been presented with the souvenir. But no matter, my research did reveal the fact that Scotland won Series 7 of Quiz Ball and then took part in a challenge match against the British Lions rugby team. Later that year, Northern Ireland met a team of Olympic medallists in another challenge.   

Among a few oddities: Terry Neill was a Quiz Ball stalwart who featured in the very first programme in 1966 for Arsenal and the very last one in 1972 for Northern Ireland; his team won both series. Rangers manager Scot Symon appeared in the show in 1967 but had been sacked by the time it was broadcast. Dr Who actor Jon Pertwee was roped in for Dunfermline Athletic as a last-minute substitute for Jimmy Logan in the 1971 final, and came away with a winner's medal.
   There are several online articles about the series, and perhaps the most comprehensive is by Vince Cooper at The League. There is also the story of Celtic's victory in 1970 on Celtic Wiki.
   Few videos of the show survive, although the very first edition in 1966 between Arsenal and Nottingham Forest is on YouTube. Recorded at Hornsea Town Hall, it is remarkable for all sorts of reasons, not least the pipe-smoking Forest team. As the show featured four 'own goals', it quickly led to a change of format so that goals were more likely to be scored by getting questions right rather than getting them wrong. 
   Quiz Ball was originally devised by Bill Wright, the show's producer, who was in charge of the BBC Quiz Unit and who also came up with the concept for Mastermind. That perhaps prompted another link, as Magnus Magnusson appeared twice on Quiz Ball as a guest supporter for Kilmarnock, despite later admitting that he had no connection with the team.

Scotland's internationals in 1898 were played on three consecutive weekends, with Scotland using a total of 28 players. The series starting in Motherwell on 19 March with eight debutants in the line-up against Wales: William Watson (Falkirk); Nicol Smith (Rangers), Matthew Scott (Airdrieonians, captain); William Thomson (Dumbarton), Alex Christie (Queen's Park), Peter Campbell (Morton); James Gillespie (Third Lanark), James Miller (Rangers), James McKee (East Stirlingshire), Hugh Morgan (St Mirren), Robert Findlay (Kilmarnock).
   The game drew a small crowd of around 3,500 to Fir Park, and they saw a comfortable victory for the home team. Scotland went four goals up, two from Gillespie and two from McKee, before the Welsh got one back just before half-time through the delightfully named Thomas Thomas. In the second half Gillespie completed his hat-trick and Morgan-Owen scored from a corner to make it 5-2.
   Only two of the Scotland eleven would win a second cap that season (Thomson faced Ireland and Miller played against England) and most would never be selected again, including Watson, McKee and hat-trick hero Gillespie.
   For Watson, indeed, this was almost his final football act. He gave up the game in the summer of 1898 and returned to Shotts, where he lived with his wife and a large family, employed as a hewer down the coal mine. It was heavy work which probably contributed to his early death of chronic bronchitis in 1929, aged 56.

The first football match in Scotland under Association rules was played in Glasgow on 1 August 1868 between Queen's Park and Thistle. But while the foundation and history of Queen's Park is well known, it takes two sides to play a match, so who exactly were their opponents, Thistle? And was this really the starting point for football in the city?
   The answers lie in the hidden history of football in Glasgow before Queen's Park came on the scene, with a man called John B Connell claiming to have brought the first football to the city several years earlier.
   The traditional version of events was written by Richard Robinson in the Queen's Park jubilee history, where he asserted that there was no serious football in the city before the club was founded on 9 July 1867: 'Football was played in a more or less happy-go-lucky fashion in the Queen's Park and Glasgow Green. Play with the round ball was then comparatively new, and had not yet been systematised in Scotland.'
   Robinson described how Queen's Park was founded after a few young men from the north of Scotland were engaged in athletic pursuits near to a group of YMCA members who were playing football. Sometimes the game spilled over into the athletics area, so the northerners challenged the YMCA boys. They enjoyed football enough to start playing regularly 'to amuse themselves, among themselves, in their own way,' and then decided to form a proper club. The rest is history as Queen's Park blazed a trail for association football in Scotland.
   However, it is clear that football was already a popular recreation in Glasgow long before 1867, although frustratingly for historians there are only tantalising glimpses of football in the press and written records.
   For example, in the summer of 1862 the Glasgow Abstainers' Union took over Gilmorehill Recreation Grounds to promote outdoor activities, and top of their list was football. Although it was initially described as 'the ancient and praiseworthy pastime of football', the activity was soon disparaged by an English observer in a letter to the Glasgow Morning Journal: 'Football as we play it in England, with two sides, and a goal to be kept by one of them, is a noble game. Here there was no game. By the English eye a mob of people kicking a ball about quite aimlessly and at random could only be regarded as a pitiful congregation of blockheads working off their superfluous physical energies in a particularly insane and stupid manner.' (7 May 1862)
   This drew an angry riposte from 'A Scotchman' who wrote: 'Failing to discover the drunkenness over which he would have gloated with delight, he gives vent to his bile in a scurrilous attack on the play at foot-ball, which was not managed, he says in the English style. It may be right, perhaps, to let this conceited Englishman know that the game of football is as well understood in all parts of Scotland as England.' (9 May 1862) 
   However, it appears the Abstainers' Union were scared off by the bad publicity and they abruptly ended the short-lived experiment with the stark announcement: 'Foot-Balling has been discontinued in consequence of interfering with the comfort of visitors'. The game was simply too popular.

The only other meaningful announcement about football is an advert for members of the St Andrew Football Club, placed in the Glasgow Herald in November 1865. However, apart from the location of their ground on Great Western Road, which was also the home of cricket clubs including Caledonian, Bellegrove and Blythswood, nothing is revealed about the club, not even whether they played with a round or oval ball.
   Although the city's first rugby clubs were founded at West of Scotland (1865) and Glasgow Academicals (1866), there are precious few mentions of football in the press until Queen's Park advertised the start of their first summer season in March 1868, shortly followed by their annual meeting on 4 April.

The club was quickly growing in a stature, as a letter to the Glasgow Evening Citizen on 6 June confirmed. The writer stated the need for dressing rooms for sportsmen at the Queen's Park Recreation Ground and described the football club as 'the most influential in numbers, well organised and respectable, and with their flags, goal posts, putting stones, hammers and balls.' This was quite an accolade for a club which was less than a year old.
   That summer they decided to broaden their horizons beyond their own membership and, according to Robinson: 'It was found that there were in existence other clubs in exactly the same position as the Queen's Park, on the lookout for opponents.'
   Two challenges were received: one from Ayr FC, the other from the Thistle FC, whose headquarters were on Glasgow Green. A trip to Ayr was deemed impractical on financial grounds, so the game with Thistle was arranged and a letter from Robert Gardner, accepting the challenge, is in the Scottish Football Museum. It was addressed to Andrew Holmes, secretary of the Thistle Football Club, which indicates a properly organised club.
   A few days later, the teams met at the Queen's Park Recreation Ground, with Queen's Park winning by two goals to nil. Association football had arrived in Glasgow.
   What of their opponents? To establish the story of the Thistle Football Club one has to depend on later reminiscences, some of which contradict what Robinson wrote in the Queen's Park history.
   I was first alerted to an anecdote published in a 1934 book, The Mighty Kick. The authors wrote that 'John Connal [sic] brought the first football to Glasgow in 1862, having been brought up on the traditions of Hansel Monday in Callander, and helped to found the Thistle Football Club at Glasgow Green. Callander boys came to Glasgow and played football at Monteith Row, Glasgow Green, where the People's Palace now stands, paying a penny a week to take part. They wore the colours of Drummond Castle, which was owned by Baron Willoughby d'Eresby. This included tartan caps.'
   I found more of Connell's story in a couple of newspaper articles which described how he made the transition from the rural football of Perthshire to the organised game in Glasgow.

The Scottish Referee (29 June 1914) had an article titled 'A Football Pioneer' which was based on a conversation with John B Connell. It told how he came to Glasgow from Port of Menteith in 1863, and brought his football with him, one that had been used in the annual game at Callander on Hansel Monday (the first day of the traditional new year).
   'He was the only individual in the city who possessed a public ball, and the charge for the use of it was a penny a week. The games were played on Glasgow Green, the boundaries being from Geordie Geddes's house [ie the Glasgow Humane Society] to Monteith Row, and the objective was to kick over the boundary on either side. Both hands and feet were used. There was no limit to the number of players who joined each side, once the penny was paid. These games ultimately culminated in the formation of the Thistle, in which Connell took a prominent part, though prior to that there was the Drummond Club, composed of Callander men.'

However, the accounts do reveal something of the nature of early association football in Glasgow. They also provide a documented direct link between Scottish rural football and association football, as first described by Dr Neil Tranter who told the story of Callander’s Hansel Monday football game over twenty years ago (click on link and scroll to page 143) and it was then reported in The Herald. ​The traditional new year match continued in the town until 1885, and overlapped with the formation in 1877 of Callander's first association football club, Rob Roy.

Connell was no mean player and was rated in the first Scottish Football Annual: 'Powerful back; kicks well, although rather nervous when pressed.' In 1875, while with Eastern, he played for Glasgow v Sheffield and a year later featured in an international trial.
   His full name was John Burns Connell and he was born in Doune in 1846, then brought up on a farm near Port of Menteith, a few miles south of Callander. He clearly took part in the annual football match there and after coming to Glasgow to work in the early 1860s he continued to enjoy the game and appears to have been the captain of both the Thistle and the Drummond teams.
   Later he played for Callander (a Glasgow club) in the first ever Scottish Cup tournament in 1873, after the club subscribed £1 for the purchase of the trophy. He then joined Eastern, a club which produced many prominent players, notably the Scotland internationalists Peter Andrews, JJ Lang, Alex Kennedy and WS Somers. Ultimately Eastern became one of the forerunners of Clyde FC.
   He remained in Glasgow for the rest of his life and worked for over 50 years as a draper and warehouseman with J&W Campbell. He died in Scotstoun in 1930, aged 84, and although he and his wife Louisa had two children, there are not thought to be any living descendants.
   There are no known photos of Connell, which is unfortunate as he is a key figure in the early development of football. Similarly, there is no documentary evidence of the Thistle or Drummond clubs.
   As research into the story of early Scottish football continues, I hope that, in time, the contributions of John B Connell and his fellow players from Callander will become better known and appreciated.