The Scottish sporting press is a lame beast, as obedient and loyal as a well-trained dog but with all the bark of an asthmatic poodle.
It stood idly by while one of the rocks of Scottish football, a national sporting institution, ran up a debt of around £80m, and now happily casts aspersions in the direction of supporters, the people who fund the game, instead of demanding answers from those captains of industry who are forever sailing too close to the rocks.
The financial sector in Scotland recently imploded: the Royal Bank of Scotland is now the effective property of the British state and HBOS has been unceremoniously buried, and all the while the tame fourth estate never had a whiff of the impending collapse.
Now, in a sporting context, the excuse-makers are out in force supporting the Rangers chairman as though he was a unique life-support system, exclusively able to keep Rangers living and breathing.
The game is infested with incestuous mutual backslappers who look after and protect one another, who ridicule managers and clubs for backing off from being critical of match officials and then lambast concerned supporters who dare to demand answers to legitimate and searching questions.
The refereeing fraternity has no-one in high places who will pressurise the press and media, but leading football clubs in Scotland have powerful men in charge who are able to keep so-called professional independent journalists on a short leash if that is their insistent desire.
The game is almost devoid of journalistic talent worthy of the profession, and if bile is the operative term for the collective wisdom on football internet websites, then bilge is most accurate description for the efforts of tame scribblers whose last original thought pre-dated the Big Bang.
What hope is there for the national sport when the football public has to contend with a never-ending flow of drivel from the kind of sporting scribe who could eke a respectable living from successfully moonlighting as a ventriloquist`s doll?
We deserve better.
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