Time to take a telling

The second top goalscorer, among others, is Rangers loanee Michael O'Halloran, who currently plays for a side, St Johnstone, who have failed to find the opposition's net during their last nine hours of competitive play.

And now there's a danger of Crusaders, a part-time team from a semi-professional league in Northern Ireland, winning the Irn-Bru Challenge Cup after eliminating a full-time team from a fully professional league, Dundee United, on their own ground at the weekend.

You've got to love us, haven't you? What are we like.

Actually, not very pleasant in places.

We've got Rangers' Ryan Jack admitting that being booed as he got off the bus transporting the Scotland squad to Pittodrie for the friendly international against the Netherlands on Thursday night was just "part and parcel of football."

Really? Why?

We've also got Falkirk issuing a club statement on Saturday night in which they "apologise profusely for any offence caused" by their supporters who were captured on live television coverage of their game at Inverness while singing an abusive song which mocked Dunfermline Athletic's Dean Shiels for only having one eye.

That tasteless musical interlude came at the same time as the Falkirk fans unleashed another discordant chant about the SFA for good measure.

The ruling body's crime had been to impose an eight match ban on a Falkirk player, Kevin O'Hara, for taunting Shiels about his visual impairment during a recent game between the two clubs.

So, if I am to understand this case correctly, a player who mocks another professional's physical disability, which Shiels has conquered to pursue a decent career in the game, is the real victim in all of this?

And the people who sat in judgement of him, and rightly found O'Hara guilty of bringing the game into disrepute are the actual villains of the piece?

I don't think so.

There is this nagging feeling, meanwhile, that Scotland's immediate future could have been quite interesting if Malky Mackay had been allowed to continue in the role of team manager and plot a future built on fresh talent.

But Malky has had to be discounted on the grounds that social media would never have tolerated his appointment as Gordon Strachan's successor.

Nothing to do with Mackay's well documented capabilities as a coach. Social media lives by moral outrage.

Malky's behaviour at the time when he was sending text messages that were racist and sexist in content while Cardiff City manager was reprehensible. No question.

It will forever haunt him so far as cyberspace's moral guardians are concerned. Some of whom, I would wager, were doubtless among the group who gathered outside Pittodrie to berate Jack or were in Inverness making dubious fun of Dean Shiels' medical issues.

But that's showbiz.

The SFA's hierarchy watched, and listened to, Scotland supporters demanding the equivalent of full military honours being given to the demise of another qualification campaign when Strachan failed to get the national team to the finals of the last European Championship.

So they bowed to public demand and let the manager stay on long enough to to fail to qualify for the World Cup finals that came thereafter.

But sometimes people power is misguided and those who speak loudest don't necessarily know what they're on about.

Celtic now appear to pay their annual fine to UEFA's disciplinary body for fans' misbehaviour by standing order, the latest most recently paid because a supporter ran on to the field to aim a kick at an exceptional player for being, eh, an exceptional player.

This season has also seen the club show the requisite backbone be closing a section of their own ground for two matches in order to remind their own fans of the need to acknowledge the occasional error of their ways.

Good for them.

The most densely populated area within Scottish football is the moral high ground.

There is always somebody, somewhere pointing the finger at somebody else and claiming moral superiority over them.

Given the assortment of events over recent days, there doesn't appear to be a lot of ground for hurling insults at anybody.

But the worst thing anyone can do is point out that somebody else's logic might be skewered and their outrage might be faux to the point of folly.

Your average fan of Scottish football hates to be 'telt' when he, or she, is wide of the mark in terms of misbehaviour.

Anyway, I just thought I would mention it. I now await the outbreak of Twitter twaddle by way of retribution.

Hey ho

• Hugh Keevins