TODAY'S reading is from the gospel of footballers at the wind-up.

As the Good Lord did not say: "In my Father's house there are many mansions with millions of empty rooms for footballers to start an argument in."

Verily, we live in blessed days with recent intercessions from St Joey of Barton, St Scotty of Cardenden and Vladimir of Weiss, pillock, sorry pillar of the Eastern church. They may be known as the three horsemen of a poke of chips, with obligatory pizza for Broony.

They are, in short and at rambling length, the answer to the journo's prayer. Indeed, they are the answers to two prayers because their sermons are twice-blessed: first comes the report, second is the criticism of the silliness and crudity of the original witterings.

Thus when Joey has a pop at the teeth and tan of the Celtic manager his remarks are laid across the back pages in the manner of a farmer spreading a fine film of manure. Similarly, the Scotty observation that Joey can play as well as he can speak ensures matters of national import are squeezed into a hole so small it could snugly accommodate Donald Trump's brain.

And when Vlad invokes snowballs and hell to evaluate Celtic's life expectancy in Europe, reporters rattle it out, pausing only to consult Wikipedia to remind themselves of Mr Weiss's peerless pedigree in the Scottish game.

This is all done with an eagerness of spirit because journalists, after all, were the first tradesmen to embrace re-cycling. Having roared at the messages from Barton, Brown and Weiss, we then take the briefest of pauses before reflecting that Joey was not so much inviting fate as beckoning it with a crooked finger and a wink, that Scotty had been softly-spoken but brutal and that Vlad had used the verbal equivalent of a baseball bat on a lightly boiled egg.

Much criticism can then ensue with journos bemoaning such intemperate language and personal criticism. Not from me, bud. I welcome such incontinent ranting. There will be those who exclaim that this sort of childish joshing is far below the bar for responsible journalism. I reply thus: my personal bar for responsible journalism is so low that a snake on a diet can slip easily under it while wearing a backpack.

Second, those who are sniffy about such stories have never been despatched to a press conference or a mixed zone to fill the vast veldt that forms the Scottish sports pages.

A mixed zone, for those mercifully absolved from attending them, is a spot where players stop to talk to the press. It is also a place where players do not stop to talk to the press. Either way, it has all the fun of meeting David Cameron at an initiation ceremony where the only other attendee is a live pig.

Those who do stop face a barrage of quick questions from hacks desperate for words, any words. Unfortunately, all the interviewees are footballers, not raconteurs so answers can be so banal that that I often entered a catatonic state, the perfect state of mind, of course, for chuntering out a quotes piece.

Now all this is not the footballers’ fault. I have no argument with the “say nothing” brigade or the “try to say something but ended up saying nothing” brigade. Again, they are just young men who have wandered into a cattle market from a sporting arena.

And if I wanted memorable quotes I surely should have been asking Abe if he felt Gettysburg was a game of two halves.

No, the problem I have is with the generals back at home. I curse the sports editors. Standing in a car park in some blighted part of Europe as deadlines crowd in with all the menace of a pack of huskies spotting a packet of smokey bacon crisps, I have held my dictaphone out in supplication to some callow youth with gelled hair and malfunctioning tongue.

As the young man finishes his address and moves towards the air-conditioned bus, I hurtle towards my laptop with the unfulfilled but enduring hope that some power of alchemy can turn “it was there to be hit so I hit it” into something fresh and vibrant. Or even vaguely readable.

There is, of course, no quality control, barely quantity control. Once on the other side of the Atlantic, I phoned a sports editor to inform him that my attempts to wrest something of worth from a young footballer had been spectacularly abysmal even by my formidable standards of incompetence. The resulting transcript carried as much cohesion and local interest as a James Joyce match report on the Kazakhstan cup final.

I begged to be spared the horror, the horror of writing up the interview.

My sports editor paused for a moment, then barked: “So you are saying you cannot do 1000 words on it?”

“No,” I bleated.

“Very well, give us 950,” he said, replacing his phone with a power only subsequently equalled by a Golovkin right hand.

There are those who will sneer at Joey, Scotty and Vlad and their sound bites. But these players are the patron saints of the beleaguered hack.

And I would light a candle of thanks for them if I did not think they would apply the flame to a rather short fuse.