SO, Ally McCoist is not, after all, the perfect son that every mother would wish for. If you were going to make up an unbelievable rumour about Scotland's blue-eyed boy, then a secret affair with sultry Patsy Kensit would fit the bill neatly. Our very own do-no-wrong Ally up close and very personal indeed with a blonde actress more famous for her (failed) marriages to rock stars than for her movie roles? Surely not?

But surely yes. For this is no rumour. ''I've been a complete fool,'' he admitted yesterday, after news of his game away from home was headlined over the front page of a tabloid newspaper. All of a sudden Super Ally didn't look quite so super.

Now, just three days after his 39th birthday, McCoist is at his palatial country home at Formakin, near Langbank, desperately trying to patch up his marriage and make things right with his wife of 11 years, Allison.

Though he didn't specifically say so in his brief statement to the press yesterday, it must be assumed that part and parcel of that patch-up job will be no more Patsy Kensit. It would have to be. But it can only be hoped that, for McCoist's sake, Patsy (who, it sometimes seems, is a bit like the Canadian Mounties in that she has a habit of always getting her man) bows out gracefully.

From a tabloid journalism point of view, yesterday's revelations about McCoist's indiscretion in the Daily Mirror was a classic scoop. Written, it is interesting to note, by three female reporters, it quoted ''sources close to the soccer star''. It reported Ally spending ''five hours at Patsy's home in Bayswater''. It went on to say that the pair had arrived separately at Ally's London hotel, where they spent ''most of the night together before three-times married Patsy left alone''.

And that, to be honest, was just about the strength of it. The rest of the two-page story was taken up, for the most part, by old quotes and pictures.

It is perhaps significant, however, that it was the London-based Mirror that published yesterday's exclusive. For, no matter what the ex-Ranger did, good or bad, in his life and times, it's pretty much a given that no Scottish newspaper would touch an anti-Ally story with a barge-pole.

Because, until yesterday, McCoist was the great untouchable. Everybody loved him, liked him, and respected him. Having a go at Ally would have been a bit like slagging off the Queen Mother. You just don't go there.

Throughout his playing career, for Rangers and Kilmarnock, McCoist was the most press-and-public-friendly footballer of them all. Supremely talented, impudent, witty, charismatic, and enormously popular, he came over as a genuinely decent man who was an example to the nation's youth. And, despite persistent rumours of him having an eye for the ladies, he was a seemingly happy married man with three young children, one of whom is tragically afflicted with ill-health.

But that was then. When he was idolised as one of the country's finest players. Unfortunately, McCoist woke up yesterday morning to discover that this is now. And the press, or the Daily Mirror at least, have moved the goalposts. Sadly for him, the way the newspaper game works means that those goalposts have probably moved forever. For now that his affair with Kensit is public knowledge, there's a danger that it will become open season on Coisty, as the other tabloids follow-up and compete to dish more dirt.

But why, all of a sudden, did those damned goalposts move? It's a question which McCoist might well be asking himself. The answer is easy. Ally is no longer merely a football legend in his own land. He has become, by his own design, a major national television celebrity; the star, not only of the BBC's A Question of Sport, but more significantly of ITV's high-profile Saturday-night soccer programme, The Premiership. His co-stars, Terry Venables and Des Lynam, have found themselves sweating uncomfortably under the media spotlight and McCoist is now feeling the same kind of heat.

Then, of course, there is the Patsy Kensit factor. Any man, famous or otherwise, who gets himself involved with Patsy is dicing with certain death by media. The word ''Kensit'' and the phrase ''quiet, discreet, affair'' somehow don't seem to fit together terribly well.

The 32-year-old lady is no stranger to publicity. She was (and tenuously remains) a movie actress. She started off as a child star (in a TV advert for Bird's Eye frozen peas) and graduated to some reasonable performances in some pretty woeful films, including Absolute Beginners and Lethal Weapon 2.

But it's her roller-coaster love life that has kept her in the public gaze. She's got this thing about rock stars, you see, having been married to three of them. First there was Dan Donovan of Big Audio Dynamite, then came Jim Kerr of Scotland's Simple Minds, and finally (and most famously) Oasis' Liam Gallagher. Oh, and there was apparently a brief dalliance with Eric Clapton.

Now, it seems, she's taken a shine to football which, after all, is the new rock 'n' roll. She has said in the past that she's a soccer fan - and a Spurs supporter to boot. Indeed, she once popped up on Baddiel and Skinner's Fantasy Football programme on BBC2. At the time she was still married to Kerr, who is a die-hard Celtic supporter. The only problem was that she announced that he was a big fan of the Rangers. Hoops-a-daisy, you might say. Still, not to worry. No danger now of Patsy getting Ally's loyalties mixed up. Because, so far as he's concerned, Patsy's history. Hopefully.

A couple of years ago McCoist was interviewed by the London Times. It was a good interview in which Ally bared his soul. He spoke about his family; about his first son Alexander and the twins, Mitchell and Argyll, and the big black cloud which had planted itself over his

normally sunny disposition.

Mitchell had a series of operations to try to correct a problem with his heart. He was very ill and, throughout it all, Ally and wife Allison remained at his bedside.

''I wouldn't wish it on anybody,'' he said, ''but I honestly believe it's pulled Allison and me really stronger together. Not that we had any problems before.''

It would be wrong to pass any kind of judgment on Ally McCoist. After all, many if not most husbands have done things that they've not been particularly proud of in their marriage. The problem with Ally is that these days he's public property. And yesterday's headlines were an unfortunate reminder of the fact.

Always the joker, when Coisty was freed by Rangers to join Killie in 1998 he was quoted as saying: ''I'll play as long as I can - and then be depressed.'' Many's a true word is spoken in jest.