My articles in our sister paper ‘The Sunday Herald’ last weekend served to prove a point made in many forums down the years. If anyone in the Scottish media wants to maximise his or her audience then they must focus upon the Old Firm or, for those who get worked up about that term, Celtic and Rangers.

Depending on perspective the reaction to both, much greater than on any of the many other sports I regularly cover, at some of which Scots excel, demonstrates either the importance of these institutions or the narrow-mindedness of the sporting community in a part of the world that only gets worked up about two football clubs for, in many cases, the wrong reasons.

The pieces in question generated a hefty reaction, much of it pretty vitriolic, because the Rangers manager dared to suggest that Scottish football would benefit from fewer Old Firm matches as and when his club returns to the Premiership; one of his players reckoned that only a handful of English clubs can match the Ibrox big match atmosphere; and Celtic’s manager indicated satisfaction with the nature of the squad he now has at his disposal, absent as it is of English Premier League-ready quality.

In each case it was essentially just a case of reporting what they had to say on the respective matters, but the issues raised were interesting because they brought me back to a subject I raised in this space a fortnight ago when observing that Gordon Strachan, the Scotland manager, has been speaking in a way that suggests that senior people involved in Scottish football are at last beginning to understand some of the underlying issues that afflict their game and Scottish sport as a whole.

Whether Ronny Deila has the football understanding to do what is required at Celtic may be moot, however it has seemed clear that he has grasped two fundamental issues since arriving in Glasgow.

First and foremost is that Scottish football has gone from being a place where fervent passion for the sport allowed it to out-perform all its demographical limitations, to reverting to backwater status because it failed to move with the times in terms of how homegrown players look after themselves.

A side aspect of this, but an important one, is that no matter how good the players assembled at any one club may be they cannot gain the match sharpness required to compete with the best in the sport if they are playing in an inferior competition.

Mark Warburton meanwhile made a compelling case for preserving the specialness of fixtures by limiting their frequency on the basis that less is more, a philosophy that serves other sporting competitions, most obviously and topically American Football’s NFL, exceedingly well.

My colleague Neil Cameron recently oversaw our selection of HeraldSport’s 40 greatest players since the old first division gave way to what might be termed ‘the Premier era’. Entertainingly provocative as it was, it also generated a sense of nostalgia for days of yore when great Celtic and Rangers teams would each visit my home city of Dundee twice a year and bring with them a huge sense of occasion.

Whatever the reason Scottish football has not been served well by ‘the Premier era’ and it essential that instead of dismissing as ‘outsiders’ those seeking to bring fresh ideas to the table and stimulate constructive debate, those who care about it most understand how healthy it can be to introduce to the discussion those who have not been immersed in this failing enterprise.

Beyond that there is, too, a valuable lesson for the supporters of other clubs, but more importantly for those feel passionately about other sport, who constantly complain about the distorted nature of sports coverage in our land.

The reality is that all media organisations are commercial entities and must address the matters of greatest interest to their audiences.

In those terms silence is interpreted as apathy. The Old Firm gets the coverage it does because its supporters care and are not afraid to show it.

And Another Thing…

What always looked like being a very important January for Glasgow Warriors became even moreso following their back-to-back 1872 Challenge Cup defeats by neighbours Edinburgh, as a result of having lost to their derby rivals three times in succession for the first time in well over a decade.

So far this season their efforts, on the back of their Pro12 win, have carried echoes of the reaction to the greatest ever competitive campaign by a Scottish professional team when Edinburgh reached the semi-final of the Heineken Cup just four years ago.

Within months of missing out on reaching the final of that elite competition the club was in complete disarray and is only now beginning to recover.

Separated from the bottom of their Champions Cup pool only by a Scarlets team which is thought to have shifted its priorities to the Pro12 after losing its first two European ties to Northampton and Racing 92 and now down to eighth in that domestic competition, Glasgow’s heavily funded squad now faces four matches across the rest of this month that may tell us whether they are genuinely capable of moving forward or have, like the Edinburgh team of 2011/12, merely been the latest to offer false hope.