Kevin Ferrie on Thursday: No sooner was the floor thrown open to questions at yesterday�s Magners League launch than a London-based journalist asked what tournament organisers planned to do to ensure that teams put stronger sides on the pitch to enhance its overall credibility.

No sooner was the floor thrown open to questions at yesterday's Magners League launch than a London-based journalist asked what tournament organisers planned to do to ensure that teams put stronger sides on the pitch to enhance its overall credibility.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt and presuming he was not simply pursuing the agenda of trying to represent Celtic competition as inferior to that in England, then presumably he had not been paying attention.

In the course of the previous few minutes we had been told that "in every match-day 22 last season in the Magners League there was an average of 10.8 fully capped international players, the highest proportion of Test players of any professional league in the world." That compared with 9.5 in the English Premiership, 8.5 in France's Top 14 and 8.3 in Super 14.

When it comes to comparing competitions it is difficult to get away from subjectivity which is where, for all their damnable capacity to be misused, statistics can be very useful.

In that regard, then, in terms of competitiveness it was also interesting to have it pointed out that the average winning margin in the Celtic tournament was again a world-leading 11.13 points, closer than any other professional league, including the supposedly ferocious English Premiership.

Furthermore it was also noted that there were five different champion teams in its first six years of full league competition, Leinster, Munster, Llanelli Scarlets, the Ospreys and Ulster. It took 13 years for the English league to produce that many different champions and 17 years in France, while Super 14 has only produced four in 13 years to date.

Yet the Celts tend to be their own worst enemies in terms of getting all of that across.

Part of that was demonstrated this week with the the Welsh Rugby Union's ill-timed announcement, immediately ahead of this season's Magners League launch, that they have entered into discussions with English clubs about extending the Anglo-Welsh competition.

As in cricket, where Wales has a greater pool talent than Ireland or Scotland yet is prepared to be anonymous as its players turn out only for England on the international stage, there seems to be an identity crisis at play there. The Welsh seem torn between seeing themselves as an English region and being a Celtic nation.

Yet far from criticising them for that, and at the risk of introducing politics to a sports discussion, the Scots and Northern Irish could be accused of the same thing. A debate is ongoing as to whether Celtic countries should be allowed to have their cake and eat it, with supporters seeking to be 80- or 90-minute sporting nationalists, sports administrators claiming equal or in many cases - not least rugby - superior voting power to those in real countries, while we cling to English wealth and power in all other spheres.

A side effect of that is a tendency towards a rather subservient mentality when negotiating with London-based sponsors and broadcasters. In the face of the propaganda spouted by those promoting English rugby, most blatantly on Sky TV but also on the so-called British Broadcasting Corporation, the response among sports administrators and the media in the Celtic countries leans towards deferential.

Celtic sides are currently the Six Nations, European and Anglo-Welsh champions. Yet rather than trumpet that at every opportunity and use it to embarrass broadcasters who are failing in their public service duty when, for example, preventing Scottish people from witnessing a historic win for the national side over Argentina this summer, there is an inclination to point towards negatives.

A change of mindset is required.

Rather than worry about lack of relegation, then, how about taking into account the experience of Sean Lineen, the Glasgow Warriors coach. For some years the Kiwi-raised, born-again Scot has found that southern hemisphere players increasingly want to come to Celtic teams because they see that very absence of relegation as contributing towards what they see, when it is beamed across the planet, as a more attractive brand of rugby than England's Premiership.

Tie that in with the superior quality of the players involved and the greater intensity of matches, then if the statistics - supplied, incidentally, by English-based Stuart Farmer Media Services - are to be believed, the Celts are producing the outstanding league product in European rugby.

Conditioned as we are by what is beamed into our homes, many Scots will have great difficulty in accepting that. That, in turn, is all the more reason that our politicians and sports administrators should be screaming blue murder about the institutionalised bias we are subjected to by those with the power to dictate what we are watching.