Hamilton Crescent - the beginning of a beautiful game

      Hamilton Crescent is a cricket ground in the Partick area of Glasgow. But this article is not about cricket. The place is where the first international associacion football game took place.
       The year is 1872. Football is already one of the important sports around both universities and working classes around the UK. The recently created Football Association was lead by  Charles Alcock. As a way to promote competitiveness he organized a few games between teams representing England and Scotland, but players of both teams were chosen only among those living in the London area. The Scottish were not happy with that, because football was already well developed in the country and they considered having better representatives. There were other problems, mainly the fact that the rules of the game were not firmly established all around the island. Then Alcock sent a challenge via the newspaper and the leading Scottish club at the time - Queens Park Glasgow accepted it.
        So, on 30 November 1872 at 14.00 it finally happened - England and Scotland met on the field of Hamilton Crescent to play  an official game. The Scottish team ended up consisting entirely of players of Queens Park, although they had hoped to field a few others - it turned out they were unavailable, after all football was all amateur at that time. They wore dark-blue shirts and shorts and the team was selected by the goalkeeper and captain (teams did not have coaches at the time) The English team was made up from players of 9 different clubs, selected by Alcock himself and wore white shirts and red caps (yes, caps!).
       The game was delayed  for 20 minutes because of fog. The quicker Scottish players dominated the first half, but got tired and in the second half the physically strong English were more active. The English goalkeeper at some point exchanged places with a field player; he just wanted some chance to score. Contemporary accounts about the style of play are almost non-existent, however judging from other games it can be assumed that the Scots were more combinative and the English style was more individualistic. As can be expected on the heavily flooded field - the match ended in a goalless draw : 0-0.
      A few years later with the growing popularity of football the Scottish national team moved to Hampden Park and the crescent was used exclusively for cricket. Currently it is the home ground of the cricket club West of Scotland.

Coordinates: 55° 52′ 20.69″ N, 4° 18′ 31.89″ W
Google Maps
Wikipedia article on the game

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch - the town with the longest name

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the name of a big village (around 3000 people)  on the island of Anglesey in Wales; it has the longest name of any populated place in the world.  The name of the village literally means "St. Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool of Llantysilio of the red cave" . But how did the village get this name? Was it through some ancient legend about a whirlpool? Or some local tradition? Or do they have a lot of places close to this church or the hazel or the whirlpool?
Actually the truth is much less impressive. The village got its name as a publicity stunt (as we can see even from this article - a rather successful one) in the late 1860-s, when, with the arrival of the train line to Anglesey the village council decided to give their place the honour of having the longest train-station name in Britain. So somehow they got this name (legends differ as to whether the actual inventor was a local cobbler or tailor) and put it around on some official places. However the place is usually referred to simply as Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, which is accidentally also the centuries-old name of the village. Currently the long name stands around only on the train station and some official documents, but it actually managed to help the tourism; otherwise noone would have ever heard of the place.


Coordinates: 53° 13′ 12″ N, 4° 12′ 0″ W
Google Maps:
 https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=53.22,-4.2&spn=0.1,0.1&t=h&q=53.22,-4.2
Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll
Village webiite:
http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/