IT is not often you find a Celtic fan clad in red, white and blue, waving a union jack with the kind of exuberance usually reserved for last night of the proms. Other than when Lord Livingston turns up at Tory party conference, that is. Yet a fair old number of these strange hybrid creatures were spotted in Ghent last weekend.
It was football colours only when we encountered a charming couple from the tough Glaswegian suburb of Milton at the Celtic Towers Irish bar in the historic centre at around 8pm CET last Thursday. Our neighbours, one proudly wearing a Celtic away strip, howled at the television as Scott Allan got ambushed on the edge of the Ajax box in the lead-up to the clinching Dutch goal, and looked as mystified as anyone when Charlie Mulgrew appeared to trudge off the pitch shortly afterwards. Their withering assessment of the state of play was as authentic as any delivered that night in Baird's Bar or the Brazen Head.
'So what brings you to Ghent?' we enquired, a safe distance after the final whistle. 'Well we went to the Davis Cup semi-final in Glasgow and it was amazing," they said cheerfully. "We've never picked up a racket in our lives but when we found out how easy it was to get here, we just had to go to the final too."
It would be wrong to infer that the tennis Tartan Army which bigged it up in Belgium this weekend all conformed to this picture. Some were far closer to their class stereotype. They were this nation's great and good, with life memberships to exclusive tennis clubs from Morningside to Kelvinside.
But as these interested interlopers to international tennis lost themselves in the moment, it occurred to me that conquering the patch of real estate in their respective craniums might just be Andy Murray's greatest conquest of all. No longer enslaved to football, such working class conversions on the road to the Davis Cup provide a handy corrective to anyone who feels football is forever fated to be Scotland's national sport and the rest must merely battle it out for all eternity over the crumbs. While football clearly still exerts a hold on the affections of this little country of ours - every other sport jealously regards its talent pool and bemoans how inefficient they are at developing it - anyone in the game still thinking in such a complacent manner deserves everything they get. Denial will only hasten the sport's demoralising slow demise in this country.
While the magic of Match of the Day and the Galactico glamour of Lionel Messi versus Cristiano Ronaldo still acts like a magnet to eager young kids, just as it does in the mean streets of Accra or Bangkok, the sporting marketplace is never neutral. Stocks and shares in competing sports can go down as well as up. Star quality is the key commodity.
It is a bit like the big club, small club argument. It wasn't so long ago that Celtic fans would look down their noses at supporters of a team like Stoke City, and treat an outfit like Bournemouth with outright derision. Rangers, in their nine-in-a-row pomp, might have considered using the South Coast outfit as a feeder club.
But big clubs don't stay big clubs forever, especially if they don't nourish their supporter base. Blind loyalty only lasts so long, as under-performing basket case clubs such as Leeds United are finding out. It is now 12 seasons since they dropped out of the English top flight. They may still be a big club, but give it another 12 seasons and they certainly won't be.
Until there is joined-up policy capable of sharing out the collective pie, sports battle for supremacy in much the same manner and the bad news for Scottish football is that for a second successive year it has been comprehensively trounced by its minority sport rivals.
Last summer it was the Commonwealth Games. This year it was Scotland almost shocking the Aussies in the Rugby World Cup and Andy Murray, Jamie Murray and co beating all comers as Dunblane captured its tennis equivalent The smart money is on Olympic year making it a hat-trick.
Meanwhile, Scottish football - domestically and internationally - continues to fall off a cliff. While there was much to admire at times about the way Gordon Strachan marshalled the national team, their failure to qualify leaves much to ponder. Who in Scottish football these days provides genuine world class star quality? Are there any Scottish players, even if they don't play their football in this country, who still do? Any apart from Kim Little that is, who may well inspire Scotland to their first appearance in a major finals in Netherlands in the summer of 2017?
In the male ranks it will be 18 years and counting next summer when France hosts a joyous footballing party and Scotland don't have an invite. It will be three years in counting since a Scottish club last set foot in the Champions League group stages.
You can't be what you can't see, as Judy Murray likes to say. And deep down, everyone of us has an inner gloryhunter. No wonder, in the once proud heartlands of the tanner ba' game, Scottish football exiles are channeling theirs by secretly putting some money aside to follow the nation's real sporting superstars to Rio next summer. Maybe some of them might even dig out the union jack facepaint for the occasion.
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