For many years it was asuumed, because that was what been the message for as long as could be remembered, that specificaly Queen's Park F.C. had been the instigators of the passing-game, although it was not clear when and how it happened. Now, on the one hand,  it appears the message may have been inaccurate but that, on the other, we have thanks to Stewart Mathers and news-paper digitalisation an inflection-point.    

With regard to Queen's Park it is now clear from Press reports at the time that the club until the end of the 1872-3 seasons, with two exceptions continued to play the English dribbling-game predicated on the equally English 1-2-7 formation. This was whilst the newly-formed Vale of Leven club throughout played the innovative 2-2-6 system that was to be until 1888 the bed-rock of the distinctive and on results already highly successful Scottish-game, a system also adopted on formation mid-season by also powerful Clydesdale. In fact Clydesdale were to make the Scottish adoption even as the newspaper report of their earliest known game, one against Granville, (see below right) on 15th March 1873, continued to praise the English manner-of-play, and Granville seemed to go a stage further, trialing a 2-2-1-5 formation that would also from 1888 become the Scottish standard, The Cross, bringing with it a recognisable mid-field and thus the birth specifically of our modern game.