For the average football fan most seasons are a bit of a non-event.

By-passing glory hunters (yes, Old Firm fans, I’m looking at you) your team will achieve nothing at all – beyond perhaps mid-table mediocrity, which in itself is not to be sniffed at I suppose.

Once in a while, though, something comes along that makes the usual torments all worthwhile – a cup run (Ha! – when was the last time we had one of those; Stirlingshire Cup wins don’t really count) a promotion or the avoidance of relegation. I suppose we must add to that list nowadays a play-off appearance – if it’s the right play-off!

This season has seen that feeling enhanced. Last year’s play-off win was marvellous but once we went on the run that qualified us for it there was a momentum to follow and while nothing was taken for granted the team was playing well and since we’d actually finished third in the league losing in the play-offs wouldn’t have been too much of a disappointment.

This season though has seen what amounts to a miracle. With only one league win and two draws up until the middle of December we looked doomed. What has happened since would be incredible if we hadn’t witnessed it. (Nine away wins! More points gained away than lost. Escape even from the relegation play-off with effectively two games to go.)

And somehow the avoidance of relegation – always the main goal just after a promotion – seems to mean more than a promotion, especially when it has looked unlikely for most of the season. (Cowdenbeath fans will have been mightily relieved yesterday even though they must have felt reasonably secure for most of the time.)

But let’s not get too carried away with thoughts of doing well in Division 1 in future. For a club like Dumbarton survival at this level is success. We’ve achieved that this season – against the odds. Yet it’s always going to be a struggle when the resources are stacked against us. The likelihood is that as a part time team we cannot be a force in this division. I can live with that.

Edited to add:- The suggestion that the Div 1 clubs will break away from the SFL to become an SPL 2 fills me with foreboding. At the minute we might be in that but for the past 20 or so years we wouldn’t have had a sniff. I suspect those full-time teams who think that may be a lifeboat are kidding themselves. The country isn’t really big enough to sustain even twelve full time teams never mind twenty. Neither are the crowds.

Whatever the temptations to paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s comment about the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (“One would have to have a heart of stone….(not to)…dissolv(e)…into tears…of laughter.”) when thinking about the administration of Rangers FC I nevertheless do feel for the genuine fans of that club. Not the hangers-on, not the glory hunters who desert at the first sign of adversity on the field, but those who have a long and deep connection – perhaps going back generations in their family.

There does, however, have to be a tinge of schadenfreude. After all, this is a club that, along with its great rival, has parleyed their mutual financial muscle into an effectively unchallenged dual hegemony, ruthlessly bought promising players from their competitors in the SPL (and before that the Scottish League as was) and buried them in their reserves to prevent any threat to their domination, pushed through changes that ensured they would receive much more than the lion’s share of any monies coming into Scottish football, perenially exercised undue influence on the governing body and (without even a nod and a wink nor anything direct, merely by their outsized prominence) on the referees who supervise their games. That such a club has been brought low by financial problems (in a misguided attempt to match those whom they regarded as their peers but were in fact always their superiors) could be regarded as karma.

I have no sympathy whatever for those in charge of the club – now and in the past – who ought to have known better: none of whom I hope will derive any financial benefit from the present state of affairs. Compounding their failures in regard to their own club – what amounted to in effect cheating their opponents – £80,000 is said to be owing to Dunfermline Athletic for tickets sold by Rangers on their behalf for Saturday’s upcoming game with a similar amount due to Dundee United for a previous away match, with Inverness Caledonian Thistle also unpaid. Hearts are owed £700,000 for a transfer fee. These are moneys the Pars in particular and Hearts with their recent difficulties could well be doing with. (Not to mention us all by way of the taxman.)

That Scottish football as a whole would be better off (in a competitive sense) without the Old Firm is probably the case but it would be in an even direr state than now were only one of these giants to remain.

And yet…. I do not wish to see the demise of anyone’s football club – even such an overblown leviathan as Rangers; even if I cannot feel that followers of Rangers know what it truly means to be a supporter (of which they may have the merest inkling now.)

The best outcome would be for the club to survive, to live within its means, and for its management (at board level) and fans not to be so greedy (for money/honours respectively.)

That’s never going to happen.

PS. I was amused that Celtic took umbrage at First Minister Alex Salmond’s comment about them finding it difficult to prosper if Rangers were to go under. Chip on the shoulder or what? Without the rivalry to sustain them wouldn’t Celtic’s fans soon grow tired of an endless series of mismatches? They might well drift away. At least at the moment there are four domestic games every season where there may be the possibility of referees being biased against them. (That last sentence was sarcasm by the way.)

A friend of mine who was born in the town let me know an amazing statistic about Arbroath.

It seems that Arbroath FC’s title win on Saturday is the first time they have ever won a Division.

This is astonishing since thay have played in the upper echelons of Scottish football fairly often and indeed for many a long year had never finished below sixth in the old Second Division (the two Division era) which meant never worse than 24^th in Scotland.

You’d think – I did think – that in all their 133 year history (including their famous 36-0 win against Bon Accord) they had managed to win a league before but all their promotions have come as a result of finishing second (yes, I remember 1972) or winning the play-offs.

Congratulations to the Red Lichties. (It’s about time!)

On a stranger note, and also at a Scottish football ground on Saturday, we have the behaviour of Dunfermline Athletic mascot Sammy the Tammy before the crunch match with local rivals Raith Rovers.

Sammy marched out dressed in a cardboard tank and proceeded to make sweeping gestures with his “gun” in the direction of the massed ranks of Raith supporters. These were accompanied by the sound of machine guns from the club’s PA system! A You Tube video can be watched here. Unfortunately the sound quality is inconclusive as regards the machine gun noises.

The police have interviewed “Sammy” but will take the matter no further.

I am left wondering what the reaction would have been had a similar incident occurred at an Old Firm game….

I see the changes those in charge of the SPL wish to push through seem to be closer to coming to pass.

The only difference to what most fans have overwhelmingly rejected?

That the SPL 2 will have 12 teams instead of 10.

Is that not just entirely typical of the cynical nature of these proposals?

What could be the reason (the only reason?) for increasing the projected number of teams in the SPL 2 in this way? Surely it can only be to try to persuade the present SFL Div 1 clubs to vote for it.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic, nor so transparent.

These bullies still appear to maintain that only a top ten is financially viable.

Well; it was tried before and found wanting. It will be so again.

With the same stale old suspects on display time after time with four games against the same opposition every year, not including possible cup ties, attendances will continue to fall, the “product” (the football on offer) continue to decline in quality – even the much vaunted Old Firm games, the last one I hear was very poor; I had not the slightest interest in watching it – and the attraction of the SPL to TV companies will wane. Then the top ten will be stuck in a deeper bind than they are now.

Here’s a thought. Why don’t they just cut their coat according to their cloth, balance their books and forget about trying to compete with the top European clubs? We, and they, live in a small country on Europe’s periphery. Scotland is no longer a football powerhouse. (That it once may have been is a historical accident.) It’s time the SPL, especially the Old Firm, came to terms with that.

Note we have no indication of what promotion/relegation arrangements there will be between the new expanded SPL and the rump SFL the changes will leave behind.

Rest assured the access to the new SPL from the SFL will be restricted. The SFL clubs will be left to wither on the vine.

The SPL 2 clubs may wither faster though.

Come on SFL. Tell them to stuff it.

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that anyone who did not have the stoniest heart could not read about the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop without laughing. (For possible Wildean phrasings of this aphorism see here.)

I confess I feel much the same way about the current position of Liverpool Football Club.

Their supporters bayed for the previous owners to sell up and for the previous manager to go, or be sacked.

Having got both their wishes they immediately set to complaining about the new manager, Roy Hodgson – who had just won the Manager of the Season award, don’t forget – for not being their darling, former player and manager Kenny Dalglish. Effectively they never gave Hodgson a chance.

It is as if they believe they have a divine right to success and to a winning team. Despite their club’s trophy laden history they do not.

I think it is this sense of entitlement that makes me anti-pathetic towards the club – as I am to the similarly deluded fans, and the overweening behaviour, of the Old Firm clubs.

And now Hodgson has gone, in that telling weasel phrase “by mutual consent,” and replaced – for now – by Kenny Dalglish.

Admittedly Liverpool’s results have not been good this season – in the Premier League at least.

Yet how much of this is really to do with the manager? Can a manager really turn around several seasons’ worth of decline in six months? Liverpool’s current position stems in large part from the mistakes made by previous manager Rafael Benitez; mistakes in signing certain players and mistakes in alienating and then in letting go others.

It is evident from the scantiest perusal of their games on television that the present players are not performing. Whatever their affections for the old manager and whatever they may think of the new it is their job to do what he asks of them. Surely some of the blame ought to be placed on them.

Okay, Fernando Torres has an excuse. He has been injured, then not match fit and also probably suffering a reaction from Spain’s World Cup win in the summer.

Steven Gerrard is a more complicated case. He is clearly not playing as effectively as he once did. That may be due to an overall decline in the ability level of players around him. He is also probably trying too hard. And here’s a thought; actually he may not be quite as good a player as everyone made out. Or he may simply be in decline.

There is another problem with him, though. I think he has too much of an influence on the team in that the other players defer to him. When he’s on the pitch they look to him to drive things on – they even get out of his way when they are actually better placed to play the ball. His shadow hangs over them even when he’s not playing as they seem to believe that without him they are not as capable of achieving a win.

Changing the manager is a desperate throw of the dice. My own club Dumbarton did precisely this just before the recent snows interrupted the fixtures. Whether that was a wise move only time will tell. As in Liverpool’s case it may have been too late. It was for Newcastle United two seasons ago when they appointed Alan Shearer to try to avoid relegation; a strategy that did not work. His unheralded successor, Chris Hughton, then performed miracles to restore the club to Premier League respectability – and got the sack for his trouble.

But Kenny Dalglish as saviour?

If I were a Liverpool fan I would not count on it.