THERE are two broad schools of thought on Gretna. Most people are drawn to them from a distance, relishing how Brooks Mileson has stirred up the pot in the lower leagues and interested in how this season his team has managed promotion to the First Division on what has the look of an unstoppable march to the SPL. Gamblers can also be counted among those who view them positively, having regularly cashed in on one of the most consistently rewarding fixed-odds opportunities of the British gaming industry.

On the other hand there are those who belittle and demean Gretna for obliterating their opposition with football's ultimate weapon, the chequebook. This is a group populated almost entirely by supporters, players and managers of those Third and Second Division clubs who for the past couple of seasons have been left prostrate like defeated enemies on a battlefield.

Rowan Alexander, whose stewardship of Gretna since November 2000 makes him the longest-serving manager in Scottish football, attributes this to jealousy. "There are a lot of green-eyed monsters out there but it all stems from the media. When we actually meet the teams, people on the boards and all that, they're fine. They accept what we're doing and appreciate what we're doing for Scottish football. But one or two managers prior to games say things in the media that make you think we're a money team, which is wrong."

Gretna are an unprecedented story in Scotland; they are a small club with no significant history which, because of Mileson's generosity and deep pockets (he is thought to be worth pounds-70 million), seem locked into a trajectory which gives them the look of an SPL club in waiting.

Gretna have sprinted into the mainstream football consciousness. That will be underlined on Saturday when their Tennent's Scottish Cup semi-final against Dundee at Hampden is broadcast live across Britain by Sky television.

The club have been allocated 7,000 tickets and sold 1,700 during the first five hours of public sale, which is not far from saturation given that in the 2001 census Gretna had only 2,705 citizens.

"The interest we've had in the game is just staggering, not just from Scotland but all over the world, " says Alexander. "We've got people flying over from America and Australia just to be part of this. People have latched on to the fact we're a small club which has come from the non-league and we have grown and are now in the semifinals. They just can't believe such a small town and small team has grown in such a short space of time. It's infectious. They just want a piece of it."

In almost an hour of evangelical conversation about how there is so much more to Gretna than greenbacks, Alexander makes an admirable job of broadening understanding of the club beyond the obvious conclusion that they will be a big deal while Mileson is around and revert to being irrelevant again when he is gone.

Alexander is an impressive, steely figure. He will not win any popularity competitions in the media after a couple of recent episodes where he kept reporters waiting for 40 minutes after a defeat against Morton (only their fourth loss in 65 league matches over the past two seasons) before emerging to utter only a single, worthless "the better team won on the day" sentence. The following weekend he avoided the postmatch press conference altogether. One journalist once drove from Glasgow to Gretna only to be turned away because Alexander was irritated he had turned up unannounced.

Some rivals at other clubs have found him arrogant or abrupt. His touchline behaviour is animated, although it has the authentic look of genuine frustration or anger rather than an attempt to ingratiate himself to supporters as is sometimes the case with his peers. After a poor start to one season he took the unusually hard decision to sack his own assistant, Derek Frye. At the core of Mileson's seemingly warm and cuddly Gretna fairytale, Alexander seems to add the edgy, "bastard" quality which can usually be detected in all the finest managers.

GRETNA run a lucrative weekly stallholders' market. Before he became manager, Alexander's ingenuity extended to anonymously telephoning the club to make a bogus inquiry about how much it would cost to book space for a stall selling toys, having correctly calculated that more money could be coming from the market to the club's playing budget than seemed to be the case. Once he was appointed as manager and that issue was satisfactorily resolved, Alexander set about establishing why his players - playing in the semiprofessional Unibond League in England - often turned up for training with injuries despite having been fine at the end of Gretna's previous match.

"I used to say 'that's strange, they weren't injured on Saturday'. It wasn't until I picked up the local paper and saw their names appeared on team sheets of Sunday league teams. They were playing for their amateur teams too! That all had to be thrown out the window."

The attendance at his first game as Gretna manager was somewhere between 60 and 70. "I knew them all by name." Only half the lights worked, the grass was too long, the pitch was boggy and the forthcoming fixture list involved marathon journeys to Derbyshire and Lincolnshire. For Alexander all the hassles were meaningless after a spell of unemployment following a messy departure from Queen of the South. There, having left his wife and mother of his four children, he briefly lived out of the manager's office at Palmerston only to be sacked when the club reacted to details of his personal life being splashed across a tabloid newspaper.

"It's about how you're brought up in your own life, how you've grown, what you've had to contend with, working extremely hard for what you get, being a survivor. Brooks has proved he's worked extremely hard for what he's got out of life, I'm from a farming background and I've had to work extremely hard for what I've got out of life. I've never seen any other other side of Brooks but I've been told by numerous people that if you're not able to work hard enough he's swift and ruthless and your services are no longer required."

In 2002, the year Mileson became heavily involved, Gretna were admitted to the Scottish Football League at the third attempt in nine years. They finished sixth and then third. When they romped away to win last season's Third Division and continued uninterrupted to dominate this season's Second Division, the club and specifically charismatic owner Mileson, secured previously unimaginable levels of coverage.

"I think we're well on track, " says Alexander. "People knock the resources Brooks has given me and say we've bought our success but that's a lot of shite. I read an interesting article about all the players who were in the first team and how little they'd cost. . . if that was buying success I want more of it.

"I've no intentions of leaving this club, not for somebody in Europe, Rangers or Celtic, Hibs, Hearts, Livingston. I know what we've got now, what we've built and where we're going. I have the confidence to know we're going to get there. Everything's the way we would want it. If I went somewhere else I would have to change things to the way I want."

Gretna have five community coaches, intend to appoint three more, and provide free coaching to local schools. Work is under way to have Raydale Park compliant with the 6,000 all-seater SPL criteria and then the intention is that their teams at all age levels will be centralised at a newlybuilt training complex.

As quietly impressive as any of that is Alexander's insistence that the infrastructure will count for little without the right calibre of young players coming through. "We've got kids in the first year of our youth academy and if that's the future of our club it is alarming to know very, very few of them are going to come through. There's a serious lack of attitude, respect, and work ethic coming into the game - or even society in general. It's staggering, frightening. When we brought Kenny Deuchar here Brooks took one look at him and said 'he'll never be a striker'. But he's been brilliant, we worked him every day after training and got him working on his touch, adding things to his game. But now you see the kids here first thing in the morning and some are like death warmed up. No enthusiasm, no life about them."

The Gretna bandwagon is travelling so fast that the dead wood will fall by the wayside.