ON entering a taxi there is a conversational bylaw that insists two things must be asked of the driver.

Firstly: "Busy today mate?" Secondly: "What time do you finish?" In return, or at least so it seems when a male passenger enters a taxi in Glasgow, the driver will work the conversation round to football and start to tease out which team the fare supports. Usually this is done by gauging the passenger's reaction to waves of the driver's opinions.

The rule is general but not absolute. There are exceptions and one driver in particular has a far more interesting way of getting his message across. Using the little Blackberry which rests in the front of his cab, David Farrell has been writing an online blog about football in Scotland.

He has written about referees, "losing a dressing room", how some players are "radiators" and others "drainers", and how clubs deal with teenagers. He has unorthodox views, defending players who wave imaginary cards to get an opponent sent off and writing about the art of a justifiable foul. It has caused an online buzz.

Football From The Inside hasn't exactly gone viral but after 10 blogs it is up to 11,000 views and through word-of-mouth the audience is growing every week. The feedback from readers, from other footballers and from journalists has been overwhelmingly positive. There has been talk of a newspaper column or even a book. The SPFL have asked Farrell to do a separate blog for them (he has to be more conservative with that one). He will be on BBC Alba as an analyst at the Livingston-Stranraer Petrofac Training Cup semi-final tomorrow.

David Farrell's name will be unknown to some, will ring a vague bell with others, and will be very familiar to those he served in a long playing career. "A journeyman pro", in his own words. He played for Hibs from 1988 until 1995 and later Partick Thistle, Airdrie, Clydebank, Stranraer and Albion Rovers. As an assistant manager or coach he was at Dundee, Stranraer, Clyde, Notts County and Celtic Nation.

Before going to meet him I asked a Hibs fan in the office how he remembered Farrell, for so long a tough and uncompromising Easter Road defender. "A thug! Nah, not really. In all seriousness he was hard as nails. And he was a better player than he was given credit for."

Farrell has the credentials to write an insider's view on football. The same could be said of thousands of other current or former players, of course. What makes his blog instantly readable is the accessibility, clarity and wit of the writing. On the former referee Willie Young somehow passing regular SFA fitness tests he says: "It must've been a bit like having a brother who manages a garage and your car never failing its MOT."

There are clues to this in his tweets. He joined Twitter for a bet when colleagues at Celtic Nation said he wouldn't reach 500 followers. It took him five weeks to get there and he now uses social media to promote the blog and to have a laugh or make wry observations.

After Ronny Deila's sermon about diet and cutting out chips was followed by Celtic losing to Hamilton Accies, Farrell tweeted: "Ronny, we'll take a team of 11 fatties if they play with energy, system and tempo."

The blog wasn't born to feed his ego or his bank balance. He just wanted to get things off his chest about what he felt was the poor quality of football analysis from former players in the newspapers. "I always fancied getting into match analysis, going to watch games and writing about them for a paper," Farrell says. "I read what others were doing and saying and I always felt I could have done better.

"Driving the taxi over the last couple of years, you find you have quite a bit of time sitting at the ranks waiting for customers. I just thought, 'I'm going to start writing a wee blog'. I wasn't trying to target anyone or anything in particular.

"My bugbear isn't that there isn't enough stuff like my blog out there. It's that some of the stuff that comes out is nonsense. It's cliches, it's people talking in general terms about absolutely nothing. I see the usual stuff that gets put out in the press and players are always talking in generalisations and cliches. I can't be doing with that. I just wanted to tell the story the way it was. Right away the feedback was pretty positive. I don't want to slag people in football but there are things that need to be said. There are opinions that need to go out there and people don't really see the side of things I'm talking about. I genuinely couldn't believe the reaction to the first one."

Farrell doesn't read books. Well, maybe 20 in his life, all sporting autobiographies. It's an amazing admission given the confidence of his writing. "I am inquisitive and quirky. I find it insulting when footballers are assumed to be thick," he says. "Players can come across that way, that 'he's no' very clever' image but the percentage of intelligent and non-intelligent people is no different from any other industries or workplaces.

"I should enjoy books but at school I didn't particularly like reading and I've never gotten over that barrier. I enjoy scrolling through Twitter, those short bursts of information, a quick stimulus.

"I always felt like I wanted to jump to the last page of a book to find out what happened. I couldn't be bothered with the middle bit. But I regret that. I feel that over the years I've missed out, maybe on conversations or being able to take part in things."

Each completed blog is sent to a friend in England for refinement - "my grammar policeman" - but there is precious little of that. "I wasn't bad at English at school so that's helped me," Farrell said. "My mate's at the point where he's barely touching it. He's told me he'll soon be redundant."

It was redundancy that drove Farrell into taxis. Having bounced between short-term coaching jobs, with spells of unemployment in between, he took to the roads in order to have steady work to bring money in.

Might the blog make him money one day? "People say you should do a book," he says. "At the moment it's just a bit of fun and it might stop as quickly as it started. The crossroads is coming in two or three weeks. I kinda wish I had put one out every fortnight instead of once a week. I'm using up my material and only have two or three ideas left."

That is impossible to believe. Farrell's blogs, and his perspective, mirror that of the hugely successful "Secret Footballer" Guardian columns and best-selling books. "People keep telling me that," he says. "Those are books that I should read."

n David Farrell's Football From The Inside blogs are on wordpress.com