THE fact that Celtic were available at 14-1 before their Champions League match at Old Trafford on Tuesday should have alerted everyone to the probability of the comprehensive defeat by Manchester United which duly materialised.
In the aftermath, however, there seemed to be little pockets of shock and dismay throughout the country, some fans and professional observers ready to receive the result as evidence of the imminent visitation of cataclysm on the Scottish game.
This doom-laden view clearly took no account of the 7-1 thrashing Sir Alex Ferguson's side administered to the notoriously resistant Italians of AS Roma as recently as 18 months ago – and at the supposedly ultra-competitive quarter-finals stage – with no visible signs of the collapse of Serie A.
Nor are the truly dispirited likely to be consoled by the realisation that the gap between the leading clubs in England and those in Scotland is, with a few exceptions, no wider than it is between the Premier League representatives and the rest of Europe.
This superiority, apparently becoming more pronounced with each passing season, is regularly articulated by television commentators and analysts, who express great surprise whenever Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool or United fail to win a match, even away from home and in countries such as Spain.
The most recent example of this ever-deepening attitude was to be heard during Liverpool's midweek meeting with Atletico Madrid at the Vicente Calderon Stadium. Atletico may not have been among their country's most formidable teams in the past few years, but they have often enough been a sizeable obstacle for any side visiting a ground that generates a fearsome atmosphere.
Yet, with Liverpool leading through Robbie Keane's first-half goal, the Sky boys on the microphone were obviously quite disbelieving that the home side should threaten, and eventually deliver, an equaliser. Two weeks before, there was stark astonishment that CFR Cluj should hold Chelsea to a 2-2 draw on their own turf.
Previously unknown they may have been, but Cluj are a Romanian side, now under the patronage of a billionaire benefactor, who are about as Romanian as Arsenal are English, thanks to the heavily-subsidised importation of a raft of South American, African and western European players.
In addition, they had opened their Champions League group campaign by beating Roma at the Stadio Olimpico, form that would make most visitors at least a little wary, if not apprehensive.
But the unalterable truth is that the English giants and their followers (including the media) have earned the right to these high expectations, even if they do tend at times to be overlaid with a slightly offensive presumptuousness and arrogance.
The Premier League provided three of the Champions League semi-finalists last season and, as Frank Rijkaard, then in charge of Barcelona, said after his team's defeat at Old Trafford, it would probably have been all four but for a draw which paired Arsenal with Liverpool in the last eight.
That unarguable pre-eminence, however, was no excuse for the haughtiness of Andy Gray's ridiculous comments on Wednesday, prompted by a Danish linesman's erroneous call in disallowing for offside a legitimate goal by Atletico Madrid before Simao Sabrosa produced the one that appeared on the scoreline. "What are the officials, Danish?" asked the former Scotland striker. "Well, no disrespect to Denmark, but I wonder if they are used to handling big games."
Not only was this monstrously disrespectful to Denmark, but made no allowances for the performances of match officials in the Premier League, where they handle the self-styled biggest games in world football. Hardly a week is allowed to pass without at least one colossal blunder, many of these appalling judgments sufficiently serious actually to determine the outcome of a match.
Those pundits who appear on the BBC's Match of the Day highlights programme frequently do more to earn their fees by dissecting referees' and linesmen's errors than they do by analysing teams' performances. And the events at Old Trafford on Tuesday, when Dimitar Berbatov's two goals against Celtic were both allowed to stand despite his being offside on both occasions, should, it is reasonable to suppose, have left Belgium at the mercy of the Gray "treatment".
The full article contains 716 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
