When they stress the importance of “blood” my inner Groucho, the one who wouldn’t want to join that club if those are the members, emerges.

The politics of ethnic purity is a dirty business. It is bizarre at any time, but beyond weird, if you once stop to think about it, in sport. No one cares if their club’s star striker hails from Kazakhstan or Kirkcaldy. Suggest that Scotland might pick a kid whose mother had the poor taste to deliver south of Berwick, however, and it’s Culloden: the Rematch.

Other countries are less picky, with less reason. The French, long accustomed to treating any place where they once stuck a flag as theirs eternally, would have been nothing in inter-national football without the children of their former colonies. The Irish under Jack Charlton were wonderfully creative,
shall we say, in uncovering links with the old country, even when it was news to the players in question.

We – and the preposition is offered cautiously – still maintain that being “born and bred” is a big deal. You can’t properly die for the jersey, apparently, unless your ancestors stumbled out of the right bog. Only a mystical connection with granny’s hielan’ tower block enables the full, heroic Braveheart.

Makes all the difference, doesn’t it? Look how the national side have fared lately by sticking with the tribal gene pool. Or rather, don’t look. Proud, pure and posted missing: that would be us. We have enforced all of the eligibility rules save the one that would make us eligible for a major international tournament.

This would be bad enough at the best of times, but it is compounded by an inability to look at the world and notice it has a strange habit of changing. What is a Scot, these days? The SNP, allegedly the resident chauvinists in this backyard, long ago grappled with the question.

If and when independence arrives, says the party, a Scot is anyone who wants to be a Scot and live here. Yet until Fifa decided to revise their eligibility rules, any number of those patriots would have been barred from playing for the country. Yet currently – and this is not a world exclusive – that country could do with the help.

Still we hear the wee, reflexive outcry. D’ye mean, they froth, that just by spending five years in a Scottish school anyone can claim the honour of the blue jersey and fight for the chance to – what’s a good example? – fly to Japan and represent the country?

In my book, five years spent in Scottish education means you have suffered enough, but that’s another story. If you have actually suffered the sort of life that turns people into refugees, babble over “eligibility” is as insulting as it is daft. Immigrants are essential to a country’s vitality, and that includes the vitality of its football.

Granted, rules are required. The game being what it is, identity tourism would become endemic if regulations were lax and the rewards sufficient. We have already seen sundry Africans and South Americans reinventing themselves, shall we say, to improve their selection opportunities.

Five years in a Scottish school, on the other hand, would make anyone as Scottish as they need, or want, to be. I therefore take Celtic absolutely at their word when they say that 14-year-old Islam Feruz, though born in Somalia, is just another Glasgow boy. What else could he possibly be?

Clearly, the choice will fall to individuals. Just as clearly, they may find the chance to play for Scotland is not the greatest honour they could imagine. Chance would be a fine thing, but how many “true” Scots would prefer Burley to Brazil, Italy, or – and here we tread carefully – England, given the right circumstances?

You can see Andrew Driver’s problem, therefore. Ply your trade at Tynecastle, but prefer England for international purposes? Follow up selection for the English Under-21 side by deserting your nurturing homeland yet risk losing any chance of joining a full national team of any description? And how do you like your dog’s abuse done, sir?

Club fans are funny like that. Ask Aiden McGeady, who continues to receive earfuls because his heart (and no doubt his head) caused him to choose Ireland over Scotland. He understands the dilemma: there is no right choice, and 
no wrong choice either, in these matters.

Driver, say Hearts fans, is nowhere near good enough to deserve Fabio Capello’s attention, and may never be good enough. He just might have a little less difficulty impressing dithering George Burley, however. Would that make him an opportunist, a fake Scot? Who’s asking? Some fantasist wearing his woad on his sleeve?

As for the migrant generation, the 
children of asylum seekers and new Scots, I can’t wait. Most have been 
treated appallingly by our British 
government. I look at cosmopolitan
French, Dutch and Irish sides and remember that beggars can’t choose. We’re skint.