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...

Meghan Markle And Prince Harry Privately Reached Out To Kate Middleton And Prince William On Their Anniversary

 The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge celebrate their 10-year wedding anniversary today.

WATCH: PRINCE WILLIAM AND KATE MIDDLETON’S WEDDING

Kate Middleton and Prince William celebrate their 10-year wedding anniversary today, a milestone that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry celebrated too—albeit off-line. Hello! reports that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex congratulated and “sent their well wishes to William and Kate in private.” Detail on how these wishes were sent—via phone, Zoom, or a card—were not specified. But the correspondence is one of the first times that Meghan talking with Kate and William following Harry and Meghan's big Oprah interview has been publicly revealed.

Kate, William, and Harry were seen talking about Prince Philip's funeral earlier this month. Harper's Bazaar reported that nothing big changed, though. “This trip was to honor the life of his grandfather and support his grandmother and relatives,” a source said. “It was very much a family-focused period of time. Saturday broke the ice for future conversations but outstanding issues have not been addressed at any great length. The family simply put their issues to one side to focus on what mattered.”

prince william, kate middleton, meghan markle, and prince harry on christmas
STEPHEN PONDGETTY IMAGES

In the week following the bombshell-filled interview, Gayle King revealed that William and Harry's father, Prince Charles, and William himself had called Harry to discuss its contents. “It’s true, Harry has talked to his brother and he has talked to his father, too,” King said. “The word I was given was, those conversations were not productive. But they are glad they at least started a conversation.”

“I think what is still upsetting to them is that the Palace keeps saying they want to work it out privately but yet they release these false stories that are coming out that are very disparaging against Meghan still,” King continued. “No one in the royal family has talked to Meghan yet or at this particular time. And I think it’s frustrating for them to see that it’s a racial conversation about the royal family when all they wanted all along was for the royals to intervene and tell the press to stop with the unfair, inaccurate, false stories that definitely have a racial slant. And until you can acknowledge that, I think it’s going to be hard to move forward. But they both want to move forward with this. They want healing in this family. At the end of the day, it’s Harry’s family.”

During the Oprah interview, Meghan revealed that Kate was the one who made her cry ahead of her wedding to Prince Harry, not the other way around, as the tabloids reported.

“I'm not sharing that piece about Kate in any way to be disparaging to her,” Meghan told Oprah. “I think it's really important for people to understand the truth, but also I think a lot of it that was fed into by the media. Look, I would hope that she would've wanted that corrected. And maybe in the same way that the palace wouldn't let anybody else negate it, they wouldn't let her, because she's a good person, and I think so much of what I have seen play out was this idea of polarity, where if you love me you don't have to hate her, and if you love her, you dont need to hate me.”

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