It is a twist on the normal order that might have further baffled Jonathan Swift’s big wee man even after Gulliver had made his trips to Lilliput and Brobdingnag.

Representing the giants: the men hailing from a town with a population of around 1400, yet who can claim to have been described by the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful club team in the world.

Representing the minnows: the men of the biggest city (pop. c.600,000) in the land in which their sport was born and is pretty much exclusively played, competitively at least.

Mighty Kingussie will swagger into the smoke today for the opening match in this season’s Marine Harvest Premiership after a trip down the A9 which reverses that highway’s conventional purpose since the men travelling from the heartland to the outpost are those heading south.

As top flight shinty returns to Glasgow for the first time in 20 years, two 12-strong collections of hardy souls will pick up their camans ready to tear into battle with one another just a short walk from one of Scotland’s grandest sporting venues. Grateful as the Glasgow Mid Argyll (GMA) club is to Glasgow Life for provide them with facilities, they are very much their sport’s poor relations, so the setting, Peterson Park in Yokermill Road, is a bit different to Ibrox.

“We are probably the only club in the Premiership that plays on a local authority owned pitch,” notes head coach George Hay.

“That has tended to work against us a bit because our team leans towards the standard Glasgow type of physique, more your Willie Henderson or Jimmy Johnstone. Not the biggest but quick and skilful players.”

As in other sports the emphasis in the lower leagues tends to be towards the more physical side of the game and that is partly down to playing on poorer pitches.

“We finished second in earning promotion last season and we dropped a lot more points at home than we did away, so we are hoping that moving up into the Premiership will work in our favour as we get the chance to play on even better surfaces,” Hay continued, adding that their principal target this season is to consolidate by finishing anything from eighth place upwards in the 10 team contest from which two face relegation.

Involved with the club for 40 years since being part of a generation of youngsters who were introduced to it in Blantyre in the seventies – another twist on history since it is the birthplace of missionary David Livingstone and is a football town, Jimmy Johnstone and Billy McNeill both among the products of its teams – he is proud, too, of the make-up of the current squad.

Whereas, as its name suggests, GMA has traditionally relied, since formation in 1923, upon recruiting those who have moved into the city from shinty-oriented parts, this is an essentially homegrown squad, a result of realisation having dawned that as the transport infrastructure and vehicles improved, allowing players to head more easily back to clubs in Argyll and the Highlands at weekends, they could no longer count on attracting those who could be considered the finished product.

“Nine of our starting 12 on Saturday will be players who have been developed here,” said Hay, who was in the GMA team which played in the first season of national competition after the old northern and southern leagues merged in 1996.

“Most of them started playing at the age of six, seven and eight and have grown up together. The Premiership is going to be very tough but they are in their mid-twenties and getting to their peak.”

They are, of course, merely scratching the surface in terms of the sport’s potential in the central belt.

“In small places like Tighnabruich everything in the village is geared towards a successful shinty team. In Kingussie they have something like 25 per cent of the adult population involved. If we had anything approaching that in Glasgow can you imagine how many teams there would be?” he asked rhetorically.

Obviously that level of participation is inconceivable, but his own experience as a youngster in Blantyre and now watching development officer Paul McArthur promoting shinty in the likes of Uddingston and East Kilbride offers considerable encouragement.

“There is more of a buzz among the youngsters when they get the shinty kit out than there is when it’s football,” he claimed.

Not that this is completely uncharted territory because the history of shinty in Glasgow is as long as that of the modern version of the sport as commentator and historian Hugh Dan McLennan points out, noting that no fewer than 16 other teams – Glasgow Caledonian, Glasgow Camanachd, Glasgow Cowal, Glasgow Fingal, Glasgow Glenforsa, Glasgow Highland, Glasgow Inveraray, Glasgow Invernessshire, Glasgow Islay, Glasgow Kelvin, Glasgow Kyles, Glasgow Oban & Lorne, Glasgow Ossian, Glasgow Police, Glasgow Skye and Glasgow University – have all played out of the city.

“This weekend’s match is also a reminder of what was perhaps the single most important moment in deciding the shape of modern shinty in terms of formalising the rules, when Glasgow Cowal met Kingussie in 1893,” said McLennan, whose dulcet tones could be heard on Radio Two’s Simon Mayo Show this week, explaining the finer points of this sometimes pretty brutal game to an even wider audience.

The same two clubs would contest the first ever final of the Camanachd Cup, the sport’s most prestigious trophy, three years later, but Glasgow Cowal was no more and had not been for many years, by the time the city’s name was eventually to adorn the trophy.

That great day came in 1973 and is remembered fondly, albeit hazily, for more reasons than the passage of time, GMA having headed up to Fort William to once again see if the city dwellers could get the better of the crafty citizens of Kingussie.

In his colourful account of an occasion that was clearly about much more than proceedings on the pitch during GMA’s 4-2 victory, sportswriter Stanley Shivas was to record the considered verdict of one Lachie McDougall, a Maryhill police sergeant who was part of the winning team - offered, apparently, at 3am at the height of the festivities.

“This is not just a sport. It’s part of the whole fabric of life in the north. It’s just something you feel,” was his extraordinarily coherent observation.

Mr Shivas was to round off his report by stating that: “Around 6am public celebrations tailed off. In hotel bedrooms and in houses around the town however, they were only getting their second wind as fresh parties got underway.

“When they celebrate Camanachd Cup wins in the north they make Hogmanay look like an exchange of dry sherries.”

Little wonder that the shinty equivalent of a kick off is refer to as ‘throwing up’ then, but in terms of Scotland’s global image that all only seems to strengthen the case made by the Glaswegian who is arguably the greatest living Scotsman, Billy Connolly having suggested some years ago, predominantly in mock despair at our football fortunes, that shinty be installed as our national sport.

That may still be a long way off, but there is something warming about the prospect of heading to Yoker this afternoon to witness this return of the elite version of the sport to the central belt. Now, about that ceilidh?