Bring Back Joyce Grenfell

THE late Joyce Grenfell was in some ways an acquired taste - but some of her sketches have stood the test of time and, like Del Boy Trotter falling through the bar, Basil Fawtly not mentioning the war or Captain Mainwaring saying: "Don't tell him Pike", her offerings such her exasperated nursery school teacher have proved to be timeless.

The High Heid Yins at the SFA and SPL must feel like this poor teacher, trying to see the best in her young charges, and loathe to wield the big stick, as they survey the daily tit-for-tat postings from both sides of the Old Firm divide on Scotland's football websites. It has all become too-silly for words.

That said, I did laugh at one offering I saw, which followed the assassination of Osama Bin Laden by that USA special forces unit. This suggested OBL's death promoted Neil Lennon to fifth place on the UK's "most-hated" list, behind: 1, Jose Mourinho; 2, Ashley Cole; 3, Gary Neville; and 4, the guy who is supposed to be shagging Pippa Middleton. Now that's healthy Old Firm banter.

Not so-healthy is the feigned outrage at Davie Weir's loyal message on his strip at Motherwell. The SFA's response was one of the rare cases which you see these days of Jack Mowat's advice to referee's: "There are 17 written laws in football, but the most-important one is the unwritten law 18 - 'use your common sense'".

WELL done John Higgins, putting a really hard time behind him with Snooker World Title number four.

Scotland gets a hard time sometimes, but Higgins is now accepted as a true sporting icon, alongside fellow snooker hot-shot Stephen Hendry; Olympians Sir Chris Hoy, Allan Wells, Dick McTaggart, Eric Liddell etc; world champions in diverse sports such as athlete Liz McColgan; boxer Ken Buchanan; motor sport's Jim Clark, Sir Jackie Stewart and Colin McCrae; bowlers Richard Corsie, Hugh Duff, Paul Foster, David Gourlay, Alec Marshall and Willie Wood; horseman Ian Stark and so forth.

Notice anything, all these sporting greats got to the top in individual sport, even though the petrol-fuelled "Flying Scotsman" were certainly at the sharp end of big organisations.

Why cannot Scotland produce great teams in team sports, particularly football. For all our lengthy list of footballing icons over the 130 years - apart from the Lisbon Lions, we haven't had a single team at the top of an official FIFA or UEFA pecking order. Certainly our great teams - the successive teams of the 1870s and 1880s, our great sides of the 1920s, epitomised by the 1928 Wembley Wizards, were brilliant at times when football wasn't the global game it is today.

We rested on our laurels and let the rest of the world pass us by. Isn't it time we got back to basics, re-discovered the Scottish qualities which made our football teams great and got back to the top, where we feel we belong?

I MET Willie O'Neill, who passed away last week, once or twice and he was one of life's good guys. A good, journeyman, but lacking that magical X-factor which separates the merely good from the great.

Like so many Old Firm journeymen, he could so-easily have settled for the mundane when his time with Celtic, the only team he ever wanted to play for, came to an end.

He went to Carlisle United, then a mid-table Division Two (Championship to the younger reader) English side. But, at Burnton Park, he found himself earning as much as he had at Parkhead, and playing to as good a level. He was a star there, only to see his career cut-short by injury.

His Carlisle debut was in a pre-season friendly against Celtic, which United won 1-0. The reason they won was simple, Celtic fan O'Neill had a point to prove to Jock Stein, the manager who had released him; while goalkeeper Allan Ross, brought-up in a Rangers-supporting family in Springburn, was under orders from father, mother, uncles, cousins and school friends from Albert Secondary to: "No let them Tims beat y0u".

Between them O'Neill and Ross inspired a Carlise win. And that's why Celtic and Rangers players of today keep their teams at the top. In every game they play in Scotland, Celtic and Rangers are up against an XI which probably contains a minimum of six Old Firm fans. The three Rangers ones want to either, show Rangers what they missed, or beat the other lot - the three Celtic fans, same thing, different order. No other Scottish clubs have to face this many on-field fans, determined to beat them.