Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen...
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Profile: Kim Jong-un

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Kim Jon-un, 10 October 2010 Kim Jong-un was educated in Switzerland

Kim Jong-il dead

Kim Jong-un has taken on the mantle of North Korea's supreme leadership with little political or military experience behind him.
But he was named head of the party, state and army within a fortnight of his father's death on 17 December 2011.
Kim Jong-il, North Korea's "Dear Leader", was in the process of grooming Kim Jong-un as his successor when he died.
Immediately after his father's death, Jong-un was hailed as "the great successor".
But little is known about the elusive young man who is the youngest son of Kim Jong-il and his late third wife Ko Yong-hui,
Born in 1983 or early 1984, he was initially not thought to be in the frame to take up his father's mantle.
Analysts focused their attention on his half-brother Kim Jong-nam and older full brother Kim Jong-chol.
However Kim Jong-nam's deportation from Japan in May 2001, and middle brother Kim Jong-chol's apparent "unmanliness" improved his chances.
Analysts saw him as the coming man after he was awarded a series of high-profile political posts.
'Morning Star King'
His mother was thought to be Kim Jong-il's favourite wife, and she clearly doted on her son, reportedly calling him the "Morning Star King".
In his 2003 book, I Was Kim Jong-il's Chef, a Japanese man writing under the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto also claimed that Jong-un was his father's favourite.
In August 2010 Kim Jong-il visited China. One South Korean TV station cited a South Korean official as saying Kim Jong-un had accompanied his father on the trip.
Image of Kim Jong-un shows him as a young boy aged about 11 This image of Kim Jong-un shows him as a boy aged about 11
Some reports speculated that he had been anointed successor partly because of his resemblance to North Korea's founder Kim Il-sung.
A few North Korea watchers went so far as to say that he may have had plastic surgery to enhance the resemblance, in a country where the deification of the Kim family is at the heart of its grip on power.
There have already been poems and a song, Footsteps, composed, to promote the young man's virtues as a leader.
However, there has also been much speculation that the man being lined up as the "power behind the throne" is Chang Song-taek - the husband of Kim Jong-il's sister and director of the administrative department of the North Korean Workers Party.
Some analysts see him acting as a "regent" to Kim Jong-un until he is ready to rule on his own.
Swiss-educated like his brothers, Kim Jong-un avoided Western influences, returning home when not in school and dining out with the North Korean ambassador.
Since his return to Pyongyang, he is known to have attended the Kim Il-sung Military University.
But little has been made public about his character.
Kim Jong-un shares some of his late father's health problems, and is reported already to have diabetes and heart disease due to a lack of exercise.
He is reported to be a fan of NBA basketball.
But these details, as with many others in secretive North Korea, are impossible to confirm.

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