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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RUSSIAN DRONE PILOT UNCOVERS RARE VIEW OF SOVIET UNION AIRCRAFT ‘BONEYARDS’

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 Cold War Cool.

When the pandemic first started to majorly impact international air travel, many airlines decided to park their unused planes in desert storage. For example, many Asian airlines like Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines are storing their jumbos in Alice Springs.

Many planes end up in desert ‘boneyards’ at the end of their career, too. But despite Russia’s enormous size, the country has few genuine deserts where you’d store decommissioned aircraft – indeed, many aircraft end up in urban environments, quietly decaying out in the suburbs.

@_klary, a Russian journalist and drone pilot, has shared some remarkable drone shots of Eastern European boneyards filled with all sorts of obscure aircraft from the former Soviet Union – planes that many Westerners may have never had the chance to fly in or even see (other than maybe in some Reagan-era fearmongering news bulletin).

Take this bird’s eye view he shared of an urban boneyard in the village of Grushino in eastern Ukraine. Soviet-era fighter jets like Sukhoi Su-34s and Mikoyan MiG-29s can be seen parked haphazardly in an abandoned lot, alongside smaller ‘trainer’ aircraft and a passenger jet that has ‘CCCP’ (i.e. ‘USSR’) emblazoned on its wings.

It serves as a poignant reminder of the perils of the Cold War when the USA and the USSR were locked in an ever-escalating arms race for world domination – as well as how drastically the collapse of the Soviet Union continues to shape daily life and politics in the former Eastern Bloc.

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In a world where air travel is largely dominated by Boeing and Airbus’ planes, it’s easy to forget that the USSR (and later Russia) had its own ecosystem of passenger jets: like these Tupolev and Ilyushin planes @_klary captured in Moscow.

Perhaps the most striking photo he’s ever taken is of this abandoned Antonov An-24 turboprop that’s literally had a hotel built around it, just off the M4 “Don” highway. Our intrepid drone pilot explains that “the owners of the hotel for truckers decided to make it different from the others.”

Different is indeed the operative term…

RELATED: The Weirdest Communist Cars You Never Knew Existed

If you thought Russian fighter planes was the scariest thing you could see with a drone, check out this Australian photographer who specialises in capturing footage of sharks near your favourite beaches…

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