The last light illuminating Scottish football was extinguished when Aiden McGeady left Glasgow, bound for Moscow. The fee Celtic received was around £10m, a record for a Scottish player. This, though, will not console Celtic followers who watched their team exit European competition again last Thursday, annihilated 4-0 by a team which finished seventh in the Dutch league.

On the same day, McGeady learned that he will be playing at Stamford Bridge in the autumn as his new club, Spartak, play Chelsea in the Champions League. Celtic will have the homespun delights of Motherwell, Paisley and Kilmarnock.

McGeady is the finest natural talent Scotland has produced since Kenny Dalglish. He is one of the few British footballers who possesses magic in either foot. Yet a myth was invented that he was all show and no substance. Barry Ferguson, the former Rangers captain, was similarly traduced in the country that currently lies 41st in the FIFA rankings. In his first full season in the English Premier League, he was one of the players of the season.

Scottish football fans are delusional about this game that our country helped to invent. We claim to cherish artistry and self-expression. In the bar, we will happily gather round the old men of our tribes and prevail upon them to tell us of Baxter and Johnstone, Gilzean and Cooke. Yet our loudest cheers are now reserved for the hammer-throwers and bottom-feeders who proliferate in Scottish football.

Behind my home, trees prevent me witnessing the amateur football matches that unfold beyond. Yet the audio delights are surely more entertaining than the visual. The language is functional, industrial, Lowland Scots. This is football in the raw played by amateurs and juniors letting off steam at the end of a working week. Yet the same values hold sway in our professional game.

In the past three weeks, four of our best clubs have been gently removed from European competition by a collection of mediocre and plodding outfits they would have been expected to defeat a generation ago. The international team recently produced a lamentable display as they were beaten 3-0 by Sweden. Rangers have been drawn in a Champions League group that includes Manchester United, Valencia and Bursaspor, the champions of Turkey, a country 13 places above Scotland in the rankings.

Meanwhile, the report by Henry McLeish into the reasons why we are so bad at football will lie forgotten on the shelves of those who run our country and our game.

They will say that his proposal to build more indoor training facilities is too expensive for a country facing spending cuts and a sharp rise in public sector unemployment.

Several measures would improve our game at little or no cost. These include a winter break and a later end to the season. Our children should be encouraged to play in summer when pitches are at their best. No senior club should field more than three non-Scots. In this way, we will reduce the number of our talented young players who are displaced by overpaid continental misfits.

And could we be more selective in those whom we choose to grant the privilege of coaching our youngsters? Preference really ought to be given to those who can walk and talk at the same time and who can last an entire game without verbally abusing the children entrusted to their care.