The Times Are Definitely Changing

WHEN I was a boy, this would be one of the few weeks in the year when my spare time wasn't spent on my ultimately futile quest to master a football. Back then, for the week after Wimbledon, my mates and I strung a rope between the two trees which were sufficiently far apart to provide us with the permanent goals for our football pitch, in the "big hoose" grounds.

This was our own Centre Court, where we pretended to be Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall and the other then Wimbledon heroes. This infatuation with racquet, tennis balls and Dunlop Green Flashes only lasted for a couple of weeks, however, before we switched again, digging holes and putting up brush handles as flags on the adjacent field, to become Peter Thompson, Bobby Locke, Gary Player - and later Arnold Palmer, as the Open golf caght our eye.

Two weeks later and it was back to Maverick, and the re-start of the football season.

But, today, football is an all-year-round obsession and while the major newspapers do try to big-up Wimbledon: well they have all these heavy expenses claims of the major sports writers to justify - they are wasting their time. Today, football is the only game in town.

And in Scotland, it is definitely a game on the wane. After the new broom swept through the SFA's annual meeting, I had hoped for genuine debate on where we are going, here in the heartland of the game. My hopes have been dashed, during the off-season, when there is perhaps the best opportunity for considering where we are and where we are going - what has been exercising the minds of the game's intellectual giants, the on-line congregation? Ach, just the usual, tit-for-tat examples of "whitabootery" by the usual suspects with their 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, 52-weeks-per-year devotion to one or other half of the Bigot Sisters.

I say sisters, because, to listen to the fans is like hearing a stuck in the groove recording of "Sisters" by the Beverley Sisters.

They really are like two baldie men scrapping over a comb.

But, thanks to Craig Whyte, I think the times are indeed changing. Being a venture capitalist, the new Honcho at Ibrox is canny wi his bawbees. SDM would surely by now have met Dundee United's valuation of David Goodwillie - Whyte is not so ready to splash the cash, and not merely because there is a risk Master Goodwillie might spend most of this season, and perhaps a few more, as a guest of Her Majesty.

Celtic, with the legacy of the Kelly Kids and the Quality Street Gang - a legacy albeit which has become somewhat tarnished in recent seasons, was once the team which specialised in home-grown talent, this specialisation fuelled in part by the dream of every janitor and every teacher in charge of football at every RC school in west-central Scotland to be, the man who discovered the next Jinky or Kenny.

Today, those young Celts who have dominated the SPL Under-19 league of late find themselves shown the door immediately they turn 20, while across at Murray Park, the kids are being introduced into the first team squad, as Rangers suddenly realise you don't have to spend the mint to prosper domestically and even if the Champions League knock-out stages are an infrequent jaunt, there is still money to be made in the Europa League.

Celtic and to a lesser degree Hearts, might still shop in Aldi - I fancy Rangers' self-sufficiency and husbanding of locally-sourced raw materials might bring them in the longer run, genuine stars on their strip, rather than their own kidding nobody five stars - one for every ten Scottish titles.