Graeme McGarry: Scottish football isn't English football, that's why it's so great

There are no thoughts of cold Tuesday nights in December with frostbite nipping at your toes, nose and other extremities here, no room for fears around relegation battles and goalless draws in a howling gale with the ball being battered black and blue.

Today, everything is possible. By 4.45 pm, for some, those dreams will be in tatters. Others will be getting carried away further still. But as we buckle in for another season on the stomach-churning rollercoaster ride we know and love as Scottish football, there appears to be one thing that almost all supporters are coming around to agreement on; that we all can look forward to what promises to be a brilliant year.

Whisper it, but after what seems like an interminable period of years talking down our game, of blithely accepting that Scottish football is rubbish and making pointless comparisons with the English game, are fans north of the border starting to wake up to the fact that in its own unique way, Scottish football is in fact, well, brilliant?

Some have been beating that particular drum for a while now, but in the face of attacks from the media down south prior to Aberdeen’s game against Burnley, Scottish fans united across social media to defend our game.

There isn’t much that Scottish football supporters agree on, but there was something particularly galling about the blind ignorance of even southern-based Scottish journalists having a pop that stirred something in everyone who follows and loves the game here.

If Jim White, a once respected voice in Scottish broadcasting who is now coining it in having moved south to talkSport can’t work out what motivated Adam Rooney to move to Salford City, then irony is well and truly dead right enough.

What has aided the Scottish football fan in their rebuttal of the attacks launched on Twitter by the ‘my Nan could score in your pub league’ brigade is that Aberdeen more than held their own against the seventh-best side in the English Premier League, earning two one-all draws before finally succumbing in extra-time to the multi-million pound ‘stars’ in the Burnley ranks.

While not all Burnley fans should be tarred with the same brush, certainly the ones who suggested Aberdeen – past UEFA Cup Winner’s Cup champions and Super Cup winners - were a ‘tinpot’ club compared to their own deserve to be tarred and feathered.

Derek McInnes’s men were a credit to their country, as were Scotland’s other representatives in Europe who took it one stage further and actually had the gall to qualify for the next stage.

Celtic, Rangers and Hibernian all progressed through tough-looking ties, giving our wee country a record of eight wins, five draws and one defeat (after extra-time) from 14 matches in European competition this summer. Not too shabby.

It is heartening that the optimism around our game at the moment is based around what our teams are producing on the field of play rather than what the Scottish game always produced in madcap moments. For years, the unique appeal of following our leagues has been sustained mostly on the fact that there is very rarely a dull moment, from managers standing in hedges to mascots that haunt your dreams and everything in-between.

Now, the strength of our teams is undoubtedly rising again too, leaving Scottish football in a position where it is no longer patronised as the poor relation to English football, but rather the antidote to the bloated, over-hyped and sterile farce that the English game has increasingly become.

There is a great photo on Hibs’ Twitter feed of their supporters celebrating with David Gray after his last-gasp winner over Asteras Tripolis last week. There is raw passion, emotion, and not a single camera phone in sight. Give me that any day ahead of the tourist-filled cathedrals to excess that exist south of the border.

There’s nothing quite like Scottish football, and that’s what makes it so great. Here’s to the new season.