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This season’s two major European finals will be contested by teams from the English Premier League.

Gareth Southgate’s England national team reached the semi-finals of last year’s World Cup, while our men’s national team have not played in a major tournament for 21 years (Our main national team is of course heading to the Women’s World Cup this year).

What Scottish football lacks in glamour and success it more than makes up for in weirdness. Only one country’s game had a scandal called ‘Jobbygate’ this season, and it wasn’t England’s – 2018-19 has been another gloriously surreal campaign and here are just a few of the strangest quotes we’ve been treated to.

AUGUST

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“I think Bowy broke a boy’s nose, didn’t he? So that was fun to watch, the way he was weeping”. So said Motherwell captain Peter Hartley, in reference to the broken nose sustained by Rangers’ Fabio Cardoso thanks to the elbow of Hartley’s team-mate Ryan Bowman.

A pretty pathetic statement and in a sane, fair world he would have gone on to score an own goal and be sent off in his next game. Scottish football is many things but a sane world it is not and Hartley went on to score an injury-time equaliser against Rangers just days later.

SEPTEMBER

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As Celtic legends for generations before him had done time and again, Moussa Dembele announced his departure from the club via the medium of Instagram meme.

“A man, without his word, is nothing. A real man keeps his word” read the grainy image posted by the striker, with the target of his ire believed to have been Brendan Rodgers. It was another illustration of Dembele’s frightening pace, as he got his dig at Rodgers in five months before everyone else connected to Celtic.

OCTOBER

A penalty awarded to Dundee during their 3-0 defeat against Hearts prompted BBC Sportsound’s Willie Miller to ask: “Are we going to give penalties every time there’s a foul in the box?”

“Eh…………………………………………yes, hopefully” was the response from listeners.

NOVEMBER

During a BBC Sportsound debate as to whether Motherwell’s Carl McHugh handled against Rangers, Michael Stewart insisted that “if you know anything about the biomechanics of the body, you know that his arms come up...when you slide in the arms come up”.

Referee observer and former top flight ref Kenny Clark shamefully admitted: “I don’t claim to have any knowledge of biomechanics”. Apparently not required knowledge for Scottish football refs.

DECEMBER

Lowland League Spartans (@spartansfc) tweeted: “A break in play as the referee asks that a jobby is shovelled off the pitch”. There’s nothing you can add to that really.

JANUARY

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Stars such as Robert Pires, Barry Ferguson and Pierre van Hooijdonk turned out at Glasgow’s Hydro for the Star Sixes tournament in January but few made as big an impression as Lee McCulloch.

When asked: “You didn’t take part in the last game, was it just your age?”, he replied: “A bit of both really.” He’d only been given one option.

FEBRUARY

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Midway through this month the merest suggestion you might be considering possibly contemplating at some point maybe hinting at an opinion that wasn’t 100 per cent positive about Brendan Rodgers would have seen you subjected to a barrage of abuse from Celtic fans.

By the end of February the man was as popular at Celtic Park as the concept of a reliable right-back. When interim boss Neil Lennon’s side took on Hearts at Tynecastle in the first game of the post-Rodgers era, fans unveiled a banner reading “You traded immortality for mediocrity. Never a Celt, always a fraud”.

MARCH

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It’s hard to know what my first words would be upon awaking from a four-month coma. If my mind had emerged completely intact, there’s a chance they would be: “Get me a transcription of all the Craig Levein press conferences I’ve missed, STAT.” The Tynecastle club were also on the mind of 22-year-old Darren Thomson, whose first words after four months in a coma were “Hearts are sh**e”. Family members are often encouraged to talk to comatose patients.

It seems Darren’s family might just have played commentary of Hearts’ trip to Livingston in December.

APRIL

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If you’re a football fan with a Twitter account you’ll instantly know who’s responsible for tweeting “Watching sky Scott brown what is going on in our game never been a bloke look in the mirror when you wake up to your children”. The lack of structure. The complete absence of punctuation.

It was of course Dean Windass. As his son Josh would no doubt put it: “The apple doesn’t climb high up the tree.”

MAY

Prior to last weekend’s derby at Ibrox, Sky Sports pundit Kris Commons said: “Rangers have hit form at the right end of the season.”

Far be it from me to question a man who has played 423 more games of professional football than I have but I can’t help feeling ‘the right end of the season’ would have been some time before Celtic were out of sight in the title race.

With the season not finishing until next weekend there may yet be more bizarre quotes to come in May but Commons’ is the most unusual comment this month not to have been sent in a Partick Thistle WhatsApp group.