A lawyer friend was telling me about his experience watching the CIS Cup final in a hospitality suite at Hampden Park in Glasgow last Sunday. Enjoying a meal and a few refreshments before the match between Rangers and Celtic, one of the attendees began squirming in his seat, his face turning as red as the Shiraz he was quaffing.

The nature of the noise was so protruding that the Rangers fan felt the need to apologise to his learned legal friends, an eclectic mix of Celtic and Rangers fans and neutrals, for the toxic fumes that his brethren were emitting. To the uninitiated, the Rangers

Titter ye not. There was a time when a portly John Boyle was depicted as having a touch of the late English comedian Frankie Howerd about him, but the lampooning of the gloriously reformed, all-action Motherwell owner belongs to yesteryear.

Like his refreshed vision for the Scottish Premier League concern, Boyle is more svelte these days. Gone are the days of the late nineties when a bloated and slightly effeminate Boyle threw millions at Motherwell in purchasing figures such as John Spencer, Andy Goram and Don Goodman from the loftier regions of the English game.

Boyle and Motherwell have

London does sweaty sporting weekends well. The latest running of the Boat Race on the River Thames around Putney, a Super 15 match between the Crusaders of Canterbury and the Natal Sharks in rugby union at Twickenham and a football friendly between Brazil and Scotland at the Emirates Stadium were all staged in the UK's capital over a succulent little weekend.

Amid all this mayhem, there was even room for a spot of rioting in the city centre as anarchists predictably clamped themselves to the TUC march protesting against spending cuts and tax increases.

There was a time when Scotland fans

So North London has a little street where old friends meet. Scotland's friendly affair with Brazil at the Emirates Stadium on March 27 should be something to behold. If you are a pub landlord in that neck of the woods, you are sitting on a beach of gold far from the Copacabana.

Aside from a considerable love of the world game, Brazilian and Scottish fans have always shared a glee for a golden throat charmer or two when they run into each other.

Given the slightly dreary statistic that Scotland's national side have not qualified for a tournament over the past 13 years, such tender moments

British by name, English by nature. The Mancunian singer-songwriter Morrissey once penned the line "England for the English" in his contentious ditty The National Front Disco of the early 1990s.

With 500 days to go until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London, such lyrics could illustrate the shambolic state of the not so Great British football side. The heart of this ailing matter does not lie in England's green and pleasant land. Not while it is grim up North. 

If the Scottish Football Association has its way, the structure of the GB football team that participates in the

During his ill-fated tenure as Scotland's first
minister around a decade ago, the former Labour MSP Henry McLeish was once
unwittingly picked up on a recording device describing his colleague John
Reid, a Labour peer who was then Secretary of State for Scotland, as a
"patronising bastard".

It is probably not taking too much of a leap of
faith to imagine a few of the country's frazzled referees indulging in some
industrial language as they discussed Reid's ill-advised outbursts over
these past few, sorrowful days for the country's national game.

When the Celtic chairman finished up his act at

Sitting perched somewhere in the bowels of Wembley Arena over the past few days watching snooker balls roll around relentlessly for hours upon end at the game's traditional Masters tournament can leave the onlooker slightly detached from the outside world.

As a sport, snooker feels a bit like golf in that its main protagonists can live in a slightly artificial bubble, say very little of general interest and remain unaware of happenings away from the hushed environs in which they dwell.

The same can never be said of football. The same can never be said of Neil Lennon.
Lennon is manager of

It is always reassuring to note that players can retain their muscularity when they are put out to pasture. Andy Gray, an Anglo-Scot who made his name in England's elite division with Aston Villa, Wolves and Everton, has remained gloriously true to his manliness over the past couple of decades, despite being holed up in a television gantry working for Sky Sports.

Some will say he stuck a little too rigidly to such guidelines for his own good after recent shenanigans saw him banished from the punditry world, seemingly a victim of unregulated male chauvinism.

Gray was always an audible orator,