AS A sports writer, rather than a football one, I am not obsessed by "the national game", but am proud of the fact, I can and have filed shite on over 50 different sports. It never does to take oneself too-seriously when you earn the daily crust tapping wee plastic keys to produce content for the "comic" pages of those bastions of truth and great literature, shortly to become chip wrappings - the daily and Sunday newspapers.
So, I love the Olympics in all its absurdities - I can even get what it is that takes British exponents of that most continental Europe of sports: handball, out of their off-shore comfort zone and off to Scandinavia to immerse themselves in the handball culture, for what may well be a one-off appearance in the Olympic arena.
Not least because of sharing my home with a horse-mad daughter and grand-daughter, I spent yesterday glued to the coverage of the climax of the Three-Day Eventing, a sport which will never transfer to the Raploch with the ease with which orchestral playing has for instance.
The fluctuations in the show jumping yesterday were engrossing. And at the end, how did the mainstream media cover it - with some gushing, sycophantic pish wrapped around the presence in Team GB of the Head of State's grand-daughter and the fact whe received her well-deserved team silver medal from her mother.
They barely mentioned some terrific other strands in a great story of triumph over adversity and a close-run thing, which is what the Olympics are all about.
Then, in the evening, we had that unexpected win over Brazil by the Team GB women's football team, which included oor ain wee Kim Little.
I must admit, having read in the build-up how Hope Powell, the Team GB women's coach, whose stock is rising by the day, was going to set-up her team to frustrate the supposedly more-talented Brazilians, I was concerned.
I had visions of Kim Little being asked to do the same sort of "marking" job on Marta, the iconic Brazilian number ten as I remember watching wee Billy Bremner do on another iconic Brazilian ten - Pele - back in 1966 at Hampden.
But no, Powell didn't sacrifice her Scottish midfield anchor, Team GB got their early goal, maybe rode their luck a wee bit, but finished good and worthy winners.
I have never seen the girls as potential gold medal winners; they are now in the last eight - which is the least I expected of them, and are capable of reaching the semi-finals and maybe even winning a medal. Now this is somewhere no senior Scottish team has ever been in tournament play and is ancient history to England's senior men's team, who haven't seriously interested the historians since Italy in 1990.
Why have the girls managed this? Well I put it down to a lack of history. Women's football in this country has always been a side show. I bet if you go into any board room in any Scottish ground this season and mention women's football, some neanderthal will say: "Ach son, lassies shouldnae be playin fitba"; that's an attitude which is hard-wired into the game up here.
It is also a wrong attitude. Scotland's and England's women's teams are rising internationally, simply because they don't have the 150-years of baggage which holds back their sinking male counterparts.
The Scottish and English women's team members, even the big-name players such as our Kim Little, Julie Fleeting and Co and those English girls currently lighting-up our TV screens all mix their football with proper day jobs.
They are not cosseted and indulged, not for them a couple of hours of training four days per week plus a game at weekends. Fleeting, whose family ties caused her to opt-out of the Olympics (although the daughter of an SFA executive ignoring Dad's employer's "Nae Olympics" stance to play would, I suggest, have been a great deal less hypocritical than the SFA saying "no" on behalf of the players, but "yes please" on behalf of the accountants) is a full-time wife and mother, full-time teacher, but part-time international footballer whose strike rate makes Kenny Dalglish, Denis Law, Ally McCoist, even Hughie Gallacher, look poor.
The girls in Team GB do get paid - a pittance - by their clubs, but, in reality these girls are amateurs in the best sense - playing for love.
When football was amateur, from 1872, when the first Scotland team played, until the mid-1890s, when professionalism was legalised, Scotland ruled the world.
Maybe, having seen what Kim Little and the dreadfully-unfortunate Ifeoma Dieke have done at the Olympics, the SFA should revert to amateurism and oversee a re-birth of Scottish football greatness.
After all, one of my own personal heroes, Robert Gardner - the very first Scottish international footballer - managed to organise the Scottish end of that first international, on St Andrew's Day, 1872, in his capacity as Queen's Park secretary; he also played in goals in the actual game, captained the side and kept a clean sheet - all the while also doing his day job.
Could Kenny Miller do likewise? And that is not an implied criticism of KM.
The Men's game in these islands is currently at its lowest ebb in terms of its reputation, it is over-hyped, over-rated and the alleged top players are over-paid in addition. Meanwhile, on the back of their superb Olympics, the women's game is flourishing.
Gentlemen, be afraid, be very afraid.
And my message to Kim Little is a simple one: Gaun yersel Hen!!
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