The discovery this week of what’s thought to be the oldest football pitch in the world, next to Anwoth Kirk near Gatehouse-of-Fleet, prompted the headline on the BBC website:

“Is Scotland the real world’s home of football?”.

For guys like me, steeped in the beautiful game, the real question is why this is even up for discussion. Football’s coming home? It never even left.

The field in question is about fifty minutes east of me – I can’t wait to check it out. Just as Liverpool fans visit Glenbuck, the long abandoned village where Bill Shankly was born and brought up, it could become a pilgrimage for folk like me for whom football history is their very DNA.

The cultural appropriation of our football culture is a longstanding grievance of mine. I mean, as I wrote in a post yesterday, being told by another country’s newspaper that you invented the game – which, of course, most of us already knew – is perhaps the most Scottish thing ever. This is what happens when your colonisers write your story.

I could talk for hours on this, but suffice to say that while England has its own proud history and deep roots in the game it was Scotland who brought the modern game to the world, to the extent that the pioneers had their own name – “The Scotch Professors”. English football was basically about running towards the goal in a pack. The professors developed this idea that actually it made much more sense to pass your way around your opponent. It’s no stretch at all to state that much of what people describe today as tactically innovative was actually being practiced as early as the late nineteenth century, and you can draw a line straight from the professors to Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola. The first Liverpool teams were almost exclusively Scottish. The USA team that sensationally beat England in the 1950 World Cup, were basically immigrant Scots – including a guy from Stranraer called James Hannah. Why aren’t we talking about this?

And yet it sometimes feels like English historians – and even some Scottish ones – struggle with the concept that a wee place like Scotland could possibly produce something as globally popular as association football.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. The official history used to state that Arthur Wharton, war hero and England goalkeeper, was the first black person to play international football in the UK. No doubt the guy was heroic, brilliant, brave and historically important, but there’s only one problem. It isn’t true. The first black internationalist was Andrew Watson of Queens Park and Scotland.

There’s so many examples. Who in truth has heard of Alexander Watson Hutton? And yet Argentina – the football mad country of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi – recently played an entire top division season with footballs emblazoned with saltires, in homage to the Scotsman who effectively brought the beautiful game to their homeland. And, in 2022, the standout player of an epic final was a certain Alexis Mac Allister – who traces his ancestry to Fife.

To me, this is Scotland’s predicament in microcosm. When I reflect, as I often do, on the reasons we became in 2014 the only country in history to decide to continue to outsource its democracy to a parliament with diametrically opposed ambitions to our own, I conclude that a hardwired feeling that we somehow weren’t worthy of being what hundreds of other countries take for granted – ownership, agency, self-determination – was chief amongst them.

And I believe it’s only when we know our own histories and write our own stories can we become the fullest versions of ourselves and achieve the sort of confidence that took the Scotch Professors to the ends of the earth. Channelling a wee bit of that gallusness might not win us the World Cup, but it might just be the separator that finally delivers us our independence.