Both played for Celtic in their day, but whether or not they know their history the question raised by two old bhoys is one of geography if football genuinely wants to avoid repetition of the sort of scenes witnessed at Easter Road last week.

Regardless of what action is taken against Jim Duffy and Neil Lennon, the most prominent figures at the centre of this latest rammy who should be among the more respected in their sport on the basis of jobs they have done, they have behaved in a personally and professionally embarrassingly fashion.

It happens to the best in an array of sports when the red mist descends, of course, all part and parcel of placing competitive people in confrontational situations, but that is where football gets this so wrong.

It is one matter when players become over-heated and react in ways they may regret afterwards, quite another when the men who are supposed to be taking responsibility for setting standards of behaviour do so. Once the boss loses the plot it is not unreasonable to suggest that there are those, in the dug-out, on the pitch, not to mention in grandstands and terracings who well that it is almost an act of disloyalty to fail to pitch in.

Anyone who thinks that insults the intelligence of people involved in football might want to trawl back through some of the commentary offered on this situation and, previously, the verbal altercation which could conceivably have turned into something much worse, between Mark McGhee and an Aberdeen supporter when he was sent to the stand earlier this season.

“We love this stuff,” was the gleeful tone of much of it, just as there was such revelry in the use of the playground challenge "square go."

Saying there was nothing about it to enjoy is to run the inevitable risk of being accused of being po-faced and there is a parallel with a conversation stumbled upon on as weekend as, on Radio Scotland, the “Legs-it” headline was discussed by a group of media people. Amid the perfectly correct disapproval, experienced broadcaster Martin Geissler pointed out that those in the chattering classes may well be the ones who are out of step. No-one understands The Daily Mail’s huge readership better than the newspaper itself, he noted, including the likely attitude of its female readers.

In terms of popular appeal, then, I fully understand how such views will be received, but does football really want to keep putting its most high profile people in these situations purely for entertainment purposes?

I don’t know Mark McGhee, Jim Duffy or Neil Lennon personally, but all three come across as urbane individuals who understand their sport and their jobs well, but have let themselves down when reacting as they have, just as the likes of Jose Mourinho and even footballing professor Arsene Wenger have done in the not too distant past.

In Lennon’s case I also understand his reluctance to admit as much this time around, because he feels he was goaded and has reached the stage of seeing himself as an easy target as a result because of his capacity to be provoked into the sort of fury. Give a dog a bad name is a tactic that has lost none of its potency as a result of people’s awareness of its use.

Whether or not a majority enjoy watching altercations and subsequent outbursts, unless there is a more cynical motive at play in seeking to undermine the men in its most publicly pressurised jobs, football need only look around at other sports to see how the risk can be significantly reduced.

By comparison with the wages earned by football managers down the years, there is much more at stake for professional rugby coaches who, for the most part, are on far lower wages and have far fewer alternatives available if it goes wrong in one of the few plum jobs, therefore the potential to over-heat is surely even greater, while the nature of the collisions carries rather more danger to their most valued assets than the vast majority of those on a football pitch.

Yet they spend their time in the stands, getting the sort of overview and capacity to absorb events that even lets them see infringements by their own players at key moments, while relaying instructions to colleagues on the touchline.

Even if there is a determination that football culture is such that it is vital that ‘the boss’ is on the sidelines issuing 90 minute commentary on proceedings as directly to his charges as possible, another model is available in American Football where coaches and their management teams are on either side of the pitch. Admittedly they still often remonstrate with officials, but the prospect of goading and confronting one another is minimised and even at the end of matches the trot across the pitch provides natural cooling down time.

Might football heed such suggestions? As with the most obvious methods of dealing with simulation and backchat to officials, not a chance, but until the geography changes the lesson is that history will simply keep repeating itself and the administrators now invoking disciplinary processes have as much responsibility for that as the participants.