Just when Scottish football really needed a feel good story St Johnstone delivered the ultimate happy ending at Hampden on Saturday.
Granted, it may not have felt all that great for Hibs who made it in and out of the national stadium without even turning up for the Scottish Cup Final but, for the rest of us, there was a wholesome feeling to the season’s big finale as this honest, hard working team from Perth achieved something for the history books.
This cup double for Callum Davidson and his players has provided the game in this country with a heart-warming silver lining to a campaign which managed to get itself horribly out of hand and, over the plast week or so, has veered off into the very darkest of places.
St Johnstone have transformed themselves into the Leicester City of Scottish football and their fairytale triumph has reminded us why we all fell in love with this game in the first place. At a moment in time when this relationship feels like it’s doing more harm than good.
This was the season of all seasons, kicking off in unimaginably surreal circumstances, behind closed doors and hiding away from the reach of a killer pandemic. But it spilled out onto the streets in all of its grotesque ugliness long before it was over.
The shameful scenes in Celtic’s car park back in November, when the title was slipping from Neil Lennon ’s grasp, were seen and then raised considerably when Steven Gerrard got his hands on the trophy on the other side of the Clyde.
Those knuckle dragging riots in Glasgow city centre brought with them an overriding sense of despair and a desire to wash our hands of this filthy, unedifying business.
Some of the Machiavellian political manoeuvring which followed ramped up the feeling that something sinister is throttling the goodness out of this country, in particular the curiously breathless intervention of justice secretary Humza Yousaf.
Yousaf did not pause to reflect on the divisive nature of his own actions before reaching for his Twitter account to ask if Rangers players had indulged in criminal anti Catholic chanting and calling for them to be sacked if they had. His incendiary contribution was high in octane but low in intellect and, ultimately according to his own police force, made entirely without basis.
Rangers have every right to feel enraged and to question Yousaf’s part in all of this but their sense of moral outrage may be tempered somewhat by the conduct of their own people and not just the fans who rampaged their way through the streets of the city centre.
The celebrations which followed their trophy presentation and which quickly emerged on social media from inside Ibrox were wildly out of kilter with the lockdown rules the rest of us have been forced to live with throughout this ongoing coronavirus crisis.
Perhaps Yousaf should have concentrated on what was going on in front of his eye rather than attempt to hear something that did not exist but all of this grubby, self serving behaviour added to the notion that football in this country is being hijacked and its reputation wilfully ransacked.
And those suspicions were set ablaze last week when the home of Celtic’s outgoing chief executive was torched in the dead of night.
Let’s not make the same mistake that Yousaf did by jumping to conclusions but if the motivation behind the attack on Peter Lawwell’s property turns out to be in any way related to the position he holds at Parkhead then the game is in bigger trouble than any one of us could possibly have imagined.
More harm than good?
If this is the hate filled, dangerous, morally bankrupt cesspit that Scottish football has become then you’d cross the street to avoid it rather than be seen to embrace it in public.
Yes, those of us who invest so much of our emotion in the national sport have become well used to the occasional embarrassment over the years. But it’s gone way beyond awkward moments and uncomfortable silences now.
Some of the extremist behaviour which has clamped itself onto our game is quite literally repulsive.
So, yes, the sheer uncontaminated joy across the beaming faces of Shaun Rooney and his team mates as they celebrated their triumph at Hampden on Saturday afternoon, provided a timely antidote.
It has also set the scene quite perfectly for this summer’s main event and whetted the appetite for more potential heroics at the national stadium when Steve Clarke and his players finally arrive on centre stage as the 200/1 long-shots of Euro 2020.
If Scotland can somehow defy those odds to make it into the knock-out rounds at a major finals for the first time in history then the game in this country will have been delivered from the darkness back into glorious sunlight and there is genuine reason to believe Clarke and his talented, 26 strong group really might make it happen.
That they’ve already been written off by the neighbours over the border should come as no great surprise nor should the Sun newspaper’s jingoistic, horribly cliched baiting of Clarke and his young squad.
Och Aye the who? That was the best headline they could come up with after Clarke had added Billy Gilmour, Nathan Patterson and David Turnbull as uncapped wild cards to his travelling party.
It appears not to have dawned on our nearest and dearest that Clarke’s team is likely to be made up of linchpins from the likes of Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Aston Villa, Leeds and Newcastle.
It’s precisely the kind of snide, cock-eyed crap Scottish football has come to expect from people who probably think big Rooney and the rest of them were dancing on the streets of St Johnstone on Saturday night, in the unlikely event that they even noticed.
Wouldn’t it be nice if this game of ours gave us something else worth smiling about this summer?
