The launch of a new magazine, the Aberdeen Football Historian, is the latest bit of sports heritage to come out of the Granite City. Together with a recent book and a couple of websites, it demonstrates a real commitment to celebrating the glorious (and less than glorious) past of the club.
   The magazine, put together by local aficionados including club historian Kevin Stirling, is a fascinating read of 24 pages in full colour, with a cover price of just £3. The first issue, almost inevitably, starts by marking the 30th anniversary of Gothenburg but also has some original features such as the club's first mascot and the strong Aberdeen connections to Scotland's first international team.
   There is a dedicated website, which adds to the existing AFC Heritage website, and combined they are a great resource.
   For serious historians wanting to know what happened in Aberdeen before the present club was formed in 1903, I can strongly recommend Fraser Clyne's book The Aberdeen Men Can't Play Football (above right), which is an early history of football in Aberdeen from 1881 to 1903. Published last year at £12.99, it is a tour de force of original research, telling the story together with detailed statistics and many previously unseen photos. He gets to the bottom of the famous Bon Accord team that lost 36-0 to Arbroath, and turns up fascinating anecdotes such as the launch of a matchday programme by Orion FC in 1895 and various visits to the city by Scotland XIs and top English sides like Sunderland and Liverpool. Somewhat belately, it's my Scottish sport history book of 2012.

One of the macabre fascinations of researching international footballers is finding out what happened to them at the end of their lives. It can make for sad reading at times. Two recent discoveries which jumped out at me were those of men who were once famous as Scottish Cup winners, yet both died in an asylum.
   John Rae, known as Spriggie, won the cup with Thirds and the first of two Scotland caps in 1889, and that fame no doubt helped him the following year to earn a bit of cash by signing for Sunderland Albion. At a time when Scottish football was nominally amateur, many high profile players went south, but unfortunately Albion was a short-lived rival to Sunderland FC. When the latter won the Football League title in 1892, Albion was wound up, and Rae was left without a club. Thankfully, Third Lanark took him back, but his playing career was over by 1894 at the age of 31. He reverted to his 'day job' as a colliery engine keeper, living on the Rutherglen Road at Shawfield Bank House, just across the road from Shawfield Stadium. He was still there in the 1911 census, by then a widower, but his death was only a few years away. He died at Hartwood Asylum in Shotts on 20 November 1917, from 'general paralysis of the insane' - medical term for the final stage of syphilis. In the days before antibiotics, it was a killer disease with no effective treatment.
   Another to meet a gruesome end was David Stewart, Scottish Cup winner in 1893 with Queen's Park, and selected three times for Scotland; his brother Andrew was also a Scotland international and, as it happens, a teammate of John Rae at Third Lanark. The Stewarts had a prosperous upbringing in Partick, sons of the proprietor of Western Saw Mills. David, like many QP men, was a professional man - a consulting engineer - but he fell victim to mental illness. His death notice in the Glasgow Herald simply stated that he had died in Perth after a lengthy illness, but the death certificate, dated 3 August 1933, revealed rather more. The end came in Murray's Royal Asylum (now known as the Murray Royal Hospital but still a specialist centre for mental illness). His cause of death was recorded as 'suicidal strangulation', conjuring up horrible images of a man who was so deranged that he took his own life.

There is always something emotive about the gravestones of great sportsmen, and the discovery of Andrew Watson's last resting place was no exception.
   On the morning of this week's England v Scotland match, I travelled out to the leafy London suburbs. Armed with a detailed site plan, courtesy of the helpful staff at Richmond Cemetery, it didn't take long to find his grave. The cemetery is tidy but other than sports historians nobody seems to have paid any attention to this nondescript plot in section 4.
   After the joy of discovery, the next thing to stand out was the detail on the headstone: his name and life dates. Having only pinpointed his death a few months ago, the date of birth was a revelation: 24 May 1856. All published sources until now have stated 18 May 1857, but I have long suspected this was false as his age in censuses and documentation always indicated he was a year older. Here was proof that the later date was a guess that had become accepted 'truth'.
   I placed a Scottish saltire flag and a few flowers on the grave to commemorate his place in Scottish football history. But I have a strong feeling that Andrew Watson deserves more, a prominent and permanent memorial that truly recognises his place in sporting history as the first black international footballer, the first black administrator (he was secretary of Queen's Park) and possibly the first black professional player (at Bootle). 

Along with many thousands of Scots, I'll be in London on Wednesday for the first England v Scotland match of this century. I was at the last one, too, and watched Don Hutchison's winner from the privileged position of the Royal Box, being part of the SFA delegation.