THE first Old Firm clash of the new season has come and gone. As far as I know Glasgow has not been sacked in the aftermath; the Riot Act did not require to be read from the steps of the City Chambers and life goes on pretty much as normal.

Rangers now have a four-point lead over their arch-rivals at the top of the two-horse race which is the SPL, but, if anyone thinks it's all over - they will surely have a few rude awakenings between now and May 2012.

The ratio of good goals to comedy cuts was three to two, there were some excellent passages of play and little in the way of controversy. One hopes the politicians who attended, in pursuit of the rapidly being discredited anti-sectarian legislation learned a thing or two, but, having a healthy scepticism where politicians are concerned, I doubt it.

Of course the fact that the match earned such a good "press" ought not to deflect us from the main concern in Scottish Football in this year of 2011 AD - the fact we are shite.

We have, as we have always had in Scotland, one or two players who are better than average and it was arguably the contributions of two of that apparently dwindling number of Scottish-based professionals: the two Steves, Davis and Naismith, which made the difference yesterday.

Certainly there was the rare sight of Allan McGregor making a mistake, but, by the law of goalkeeping averages, he was due a howler, but, over the piece, Davis and Naismith as much as anyone made the difference.

Rangers will push on from here, Celtic will re-group and continue the chase; the rest - well with each successive year in which it boils down to Celtic or Rangers, Scottish Football goes backwards and becomes more and more irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Let's face it, for all their excellence yesterday, neither Davis nor Naismith is going to get anywhere near anyone's who has any lengthy relationship with the Ibrox club's  All-Time Rangers XI. Similarly nobody in yesterday's Celtic contingent is going to challenge for a place in the AT Celtic XI. Indeed, I might suggest you'd be down to about the seventh or eighth teams before any current player's name would be thrown into the selection mix - yet still they dominate.

The onus falls not on Celtic or Rangers to lift Scottish Football our of the current doldrums, it falls on the other ten clubs.

If they raise their game - the Old Firm will be forced to raise theirs in response and we might see Scottish clubs in Europe beyond August on merit rather than on the whims of what passes for football "justice".

It our current masters are not regularly and seriously challenged, the increasingly vocal successors to Private Fraser and Victor Meldrew will b ecome ever-more vocal and their protestations that we are all doomed will be accepted as fact.

One Old Firm remembered for the football rather than the arguments does not signal the end of the bad times. It doesn't even signal a sighting of the light at the end of the tunnel.

Scottish Football is more than the Old Firm; it is time for the rest to remember that and do something about the status quo, if the good times are to return.