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...

Victoria Falls is open for tourism: here's why you should take the plunge

 

The falls are truly magnificent but Victoria Falls, the Zimbabwean tourist town, has much more to offer, with crazy offers right now — both budget and luxe

29 August 2021 - 00:02BY SANET OBERHOLZER

One of the most candid people I've met is Georges C Imbault. "It's just four seconds but it's the longest four seconds of your life," he half-shouts from his perch at the end of the walkway under the Victoria Falls Bridge. Admittedly, this is not the real Imbault, a Frenchman appointed as chief construction engineer of the bridge in 1903, but a modern-day impersonator. (Real name) Kim Adams is a guide with Shearwater Victoria Falls (https://www.shearwatervictoriafalls.com/), and he dons a pair of period spectacles, braces, a fedora and tie to play an Imbault "scorched by the African sun", to tell visitors a most animated tale of how the bridge, completed in 1905, was built.

That was phase one of the bridge tour. But now we are in phase two and "Imbault" has just led us - harnessed and attached to the 116-year-old structure with carabiners - along the length of the walkway...

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