On Saint Andrew's Day, 1872, four thousand people stood around a cricket ground in Partick to watch something that had never happened before: England against Scotland, the first international football match ever played. England's captain was a twenty-two-year-old from Dover - a man the game would forget so completely that in 2013 Steven Gerrard admitted he'd never heard of him.
His name was Cuthbert Ottaway. The records catch him winning blues in five sports at Oxford, sailing for Canada with W. G. Grace, captaining England in both his internationals - and being hacked out of an FA Cup final at twenty-four. Dead of pneumonia at twenty-seven, mourned as a cricketer, his grave left unmarked for forty years.
This is his story, told through the records he left behind.
