On the 30th August 1884 a match was played at Tontine Park in Renton in Dunbartonshire between the local club and Irwell Springs. It would be the first game Renton would play against English opposition and also the first Irwell would have in Scotland. On this occasion the home-team would win easily 9-1, but in the game that followed regularly between the two teams over the next seasons that would reduce to 2-0 away.

So why the hook-up? Since that time Irwell Springs F.C. has become Bacup Borough, named for the adjacent town, playing still in the North West Counties League and at West View, the ground they have occupied since 1889. But Bacup aka Irwell, whilst it was in 1879 one of the last teams to be formed in the hotbed of early football that was North East Lancashire, was not Lancastrian in origin. The story is that it was founded by two Scottish brothers, John and Robert Rankine and that they had been Vale of Leven players. In fact the story deems to have been distorted in the telling. The Rankines, born respectively in 1856 and 1858, were, in fact, from Rutherglen but were in the dyeing trade, John a Turkey-Red specialist. It was that which brought them to Bacup in 1878 , coincidentally or not just as The Vale prospered but the original Renton FC faltered, and to the the Irwell Springs Dyeing Works, where the younger Robert would become Works Manager. But it may well have been via the Turkey-Red-specialising valley of the Dunbartonshire Leven yet perhaps not Alexandria but its immediate neighbour.

And here is the tale. Both brothers would settle in Bacup, living out the rest of their lives there with John marrying a local girl. But Robert would shortly after arrival return North to Rutherglen for his bride, Annie, with whom in Lancashire he would have seven children. But in 1891 she died and a year later Robert at thirty-four would remarry. His new wife would be twenty-four. Her name was Magdaline Gillespie. She had been born in 1868 in Dumbarton and as a girl in 1881 had been living there on on the east side of the river in Levenbank St. so in the parish of Cardross, the same parish as Renton. And by her wedding she was still there in 1891 by then a Printfield Worker, presumably at Renton's Dalquhurn. It suggests that certainly Robert knew the vale, had maintained contacts there, might even have briefly worked and lived there in the mid-1870s, could even with his brother, although no Rankine is mentioned in known team-sheets, have played football there and been held in high enough esteem in wider Cardross footballing-circles not just for the 1883 visit from the South, but another exactly a year later and then a third game, on 2nd April 1885, this time down in Bacup.