There's something rather nice about a Scottish footballing weekend where the biggest match doesn't involve the Old Firm, and the inevitable baggage that comes stuck to them like a diseased, festering limpet.
In fact, the biggest match in the country was in, of all places, Dingwall, where Ross County and Falkirk met in a clash between the top two sides in the first division. Whilst there was a bit of stirring beforehand, with the two managers slagging each other off to the press, it came as much amusement, at least to this writer, when Derek Adams and Steven Pressley in fact admitted after the game that their 'spat' was more about increasing interest in the game than about managerial mind-games.
It at least partly worked; more than four thousand souls pitched up to Victoria Park, an attendance that certainly bettered crowds at SPL matches at St. Johnstone, St. Mirren, Dunfermline, Kilmarnock and Inverness (Ross County's local rivals of course) this season. And those of us who turned up saw a match which made up for a lack of quality with great intensity and effort, as the home side ran out 3-1 winners. County now find themselves with a sturdy six point cushion at the top of the table. Whilst it wasn't necessarily a good advert for an expanded SPL - my father and I agreed that, aside from former Caley Thistle stalwart Grant Munro in the home defence, there wasn't a single player on the pitch who would obviously be capable of stepping up a level - it certainly indicated that Scotland's second tier is perfectly capable of putting on a good show, even if the cost of a terracing ticket was a rather steep £14.
The result has also, of course, seriously raised the possibility of County winning promotion to the SPL and, if Caley Thistle were to stay up this year (by no means a sure thing), the top division would contain two Highland teams for the 2011/12 season. Considering there weren't any Highland teams in the whole of the Scottish Football League 18 years ago, that would be no mean feat.
It could also have significant implications. Whilst claims from Caley Thistle fans - and, on occasion, from manager Terry Butcher - that streamlining the SPL to ten teams is an attempt to keep ICT out of the top league and reduce the travelling for everyone else is surely paranoia, there is no doubt that teams do not particularly enjoy jaunting up the A9 a couple of times a season as it is. The idea that this burden could be doubled will probably not enamour the other SPL sides.
In contrast, it would potentially have mutual benefits for Caley and County. For one thing, four derbies a season would pretty much guarantee four capacity crowds - something that would only otherwise happen when the Gruesome Twosome were in town. That would be of fair significance; certainly the likely attendance for next weekend's Caley-Celtic game will be double the number who turned up for the previous home match against Motherwell. So that's a decent increase in gate receipts, no question.
The other interesting factor is that, in terms of decision-making on the future of the SPL, Inverness and Ross County will surely have identical interests, giving them, in effect, a small voting bloc. It would, for one thing, surely mean that there would be no reduction in the size of the division to ten teams whilst both those sides competed in it.
The Scottish football map has certainly changed a bit since 1974, when Inverness Thistle were denied entry to the league in favour of an engineer works team called Ferranti Thistle - the voting clubs were so desperate to avoid the extra travelling north that they elected a club from Edinburgh (which already had two teams), whose ground was not up to standard, and who were not allowed to play under the Ferranti title due to league rules banning the use of a sponsor's name. Ferranti ended up having to move to Meadowbank, and use that name, in order to compete (they are, of course, now Livingston).
In 1994, the Scottish football league finally made up for that scandalous decision by bringing in both Caley Thistle and County - and I wonder if a few chairmen at the top clubs might be regretting that move if, next season, one-sixth of the Scottish Premier League is based more than a hundred miles north of Perth?
L.
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