ONE of my oldest friends in journalism switched off his laptop at the end of the 2009-2010 season, to concentrate on other things, such as (so far very successfully) fighting-off the cancer cells which were attacking his body, completing his grand tour of every state in the USA and keeping fit.
Last season, as a favour,he helped-out his successor by covering a couple of games, but otherwise he is happily out of the football coverage rat race and, he says, all the better for it.
This now retired gentleman tells a great story about his time as the Scottish Football Writers Association's liaison officer with the SFA. His first meeting inside Hampden in that post involved the planning meeting for a World Cup qualifier. My mate arived with a dossier on what the football writers might require to allow them and their friends following the opposition to fulfill their role properly; he had some suggestions to put forward, but never got the chance.
"The bulk of the meeting was taken-up with a discussion as to which wines and of which vintage would be served at the post-match banquet", he recalls.
"For the SFA that was the most-important thing, making sure they had the right trough in which to place their snouts".
As far as I know, a couple of decades on, little has changed at Hampden. The football and the needs of the guys working at it come a long way second to the requirements of the "blazers", as the Hampden High Heid Yins are called.
To take a slight diversion here - I always preferred the now somewhat old hat description of the rugby equivalent of the "blazers" - the 'Alickadoos', as in: "Him, all he can do is talk".
Let's face it, Scotland, particularly now Craig Levein is down to the bare bones of his squad, are by no means a shoo-in to beat Lithuania tonight. We ought still be able to get a draw, but I am far from confident in our ability to beat them.
If we don't, it's not so much Goodnight Vienna as goodnight Warsaw and Kiev; we'll have to endure another early summer of wall-to-wall televised "Ingerlund, Ingerlund, Ingerlund" in nine months time.
But, the blazers' bandwagon will roll on. Our guys who have secured their places on the various UEFA sub-committees, our own committee-men, the very guys who have presided over our tournament qualifying travails, they'll be OK, out there in Poland and Ukraine on their UEFA/SFA funded "jollies", meeting and greeting, quaffing fine wines and eating fine food - they'll be fine. It will be the usual suspects, the PBI of the Tartan Army, back home growing frustrated in their confinement to Scotland, who will be suffering.
When we fail- that failure may well be signalled tonight, or when, as past Scottish form suggests it might be by only drawing with Leichtenstein, or when the Spanish matadors are awarded Darren Fletcher's ears and McShagger's cojones after the final game - the disapproval of a nation will rumble down on the head of poor Craig Levein.
He will be castigated left, right and centre - he might even be forced from office, signalling the start of a lengthy process before the next patsie is unveiled to a somewhat disinterested world at Hampden - whereupon the whole sorry pantomime will start up again.
Or he may limp on, forced to carry the nation's aspirations on a rickety wheelbarrow, with a flat tyre, holes in the side and unequal-length forks.
The guys who got us into this mess - the directors who actually run our clubs and our game, they will escape censure and will get back to doing what they do best - arguing about Sauvignon over Shiraz, over Merlot and whether they have cheesecake or profitterols for dessert.
They don't have to worry about results, about what pot we are in for tournament draws, about national co-efficients. So long as they get their accustomed five-star luxury, everything is fine.
And until we shake them up, force them to make the necessary changes - we will get nowhere other than an ever-lower place in football's European and world pecking order.
The fact that none of us, press or fans, are taking to task the ment at the top, the ones we ought to be taking to task forces me to again consider the question at the top of this post - and conclude: WE DON'T REALLY WANT TO SUCCEED.
Otherwise, we'd have done something long ago.
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