LOCKERROOM:Let Celtic and Rangers fly south. Then pump money into developing a proper Scottish league, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

SO LIKE the onset of rigor mortis the Scottish League season hardens into what passes for a satisfying finish with neither Celtic nor Rangers having the quality or the decency to finish each other off before the final reel.

We care about this more than we care about the outcome of say, the Welsh league (where, incidentally I am tipping Ento Aberaman Athletic to hold off the challenge of Goytre United) or, if we are to be honest, the League of Ireland because the annual two carthorse race for the SPL represents a pantomime/morality play version of the old sectarianism-poxed world we loved so well.

When we had nothing else to cling to we stuck with what divided us rather than what united us, the sense that on our red-hair-and-freckles side of the house we had better music and a superior moral sensibility, while on theirs, they bowed to nobody when it came to banging big drums and had a more advanced purchase on evolution.

Funny thing is, money washed over Ireland not long after the peace process broke out and Celtic and Rangers, though they still adhere to our imaginations, became less about life or death and more about options on the à la carte menu of world sport. We got money. We developed a sense of irony.

Many of those who made the pilgrimages to Glasgow began to fly there and to stay in better hotels and can’t have helped noticing that the tide which had lifted their own boat was doing little worthwhile for Govan or Parkhead.

And so Rangers and Celtic have continued their death match, the cash cows of the SPL with their horns eternally locked together.

They are increasingly irrelevant and should be cut free to pursue their ambitions in the English Premier League down south, thus freeing Scottish football of its financial addiction to their quaint rivalry.

It’s 42 years next week since Celtic won the European Cup, an achievement which grows in stature and affection the more you consider that Bobby Lennox, from the distant Ayrshire coast some 30 miles away, had travelled the farthest to become a Celtic player.

Celtic has such self-belief in what they had that Jock Stein announced his side two days before the game and told the world at the same press conference Celtic were going to win.

Many of us grew up loving the legend of that side and their madcap attacking style and the story of the two sides standing in the tunnel in Lisbon waiting to go out on to the field and Bertie Auld (who with Ronnie Simpson, Tommy Gemmell and Willie Wallace was one of four non-Catholics on the side) starting the team up singing The Celtic Song.

Crazy stuff and so long ago it fades in importance and relevance. Back then it was possible to put together a side like that had been brought through the system and dyed in the club’s wool, to put them together and to become the best in Europe.

That was romance.

Today, romantic football is dead and gone and with Jock Stein in the grave. Ask Arsene. His dream of gathering the most fresh-faced young talents from around the world and growing them into a scintillating Arsenal team will give way to the reality that he needs to spend big money on big men whose careers he had no part in shaping.

And the SPL, sadly, is dead and gone too.

This year as Celtic and Rangers have struggled to give the title to each other, the powers that be in Scottish football have been arguing over the state of the nation.

The SPL’s top man Lex Gold (what a name for a modern soccer executive) has spent a lot of the season returning fire on the Scottish Football Association clubs’ George Peat, who has been taking potshots at the big boys.

They are both right. Scottish football is poor, but you can point to enough instances where it is decent and exciting to make your argument. Attendances are bad, but the Old Firm distorts everything.

Attendances are marginally (less than 1 per cent) up this season, but Celtic are drawing 57,237 a game and Rangers are hauling in 47,306 a game, but next on the list are Hearts, who attract 14,427 a game on average, which would place them the 18th-best supported team in the Championship down south, below Watford, but just above QPR.

At Inverness, the level of indifference to the SPL is at the sort of level Gretna achieved a year or so ago, the average attendance of 4,344 leaves their ground less than 20 per cent full every match day.

Gretna, you will remember, managed to get promoted to the SPl, whose rules demanded they then provide a stadium with 6,000 seats. For a town of 3,000 people, this seemed somewhat unreasonable.

They entered into an ill-fated ground-sharing arrangement with Motherwell, who found their ground was unplayable once or twice when Gretna were due to play on it.

Gretna ran in attendance figures of 501 (versus Dundee United) and 431 (versus Caledonian) before going into administration.

The time has come to take away the Old Firm, let them fly south, charge them an exit toll of a pound per head on attendances at home games and an annual subvention from the massive Sky TV money and make Scottish football more about the Gretnas and the Invernesses and pump money into developing local talent and a domestic league which isn’t distorted by the presence of two entities way too big for their environment.

Draw a new financial model for the SPL, spare us the tedium of four Old Firm games every season, expand the top flight, which next year will welcome back St Johnstone and should also be accommodating clubs like Dunfermline, Partick and Morton.

What’s to be lost? Rugby mania has never quite gripped Scotland in the way of a pandemic. Shinty or caber tossing are unlikely to become the principal sports. Mankind has evolved to the point where the bagpipes will soon be driven underground and grants given to buy uilleann pipes instead. We are bored of tartan, shortbread and twee questions about what a Scotsman wears under his kilt.

And honestly, we are ceasing to care about Celtic and Rangers.

Soccer is what Scotland does and right now it is like a lost industry. There was a time not long ago when every major English club seemed to be backboned by majorly-talented Scottish players and the national team’s exit from the first round of the World Cup was as integral a part of the occasion as the opening ceremony.

Somebody needs to be big and bold and brave, in the spirit of the Lions.