A spectre is haunting Scottish football. The spectre of Connah's Quay Nomads It's safe to say that, between the Irn Bru / Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Cup, and Thursday night's astonishing upset at Rugby Park, Scottish football fans might be getting heartily sick of the sight of Andy Morrison 's er, robust outfit. If you believe all you read, his high-tempo, route one, muscle-bound eleven, apparently strict disciples of the doctrine of Wing Commander Charles Reep , can be like watching an eighties football nostalgia programme, featuring an aerial battle between Harry Bassett's Wimbledon and Howard Wilkinson's Sheffield Wednesday. The epithets for Morrison's team north of the border haven't been flattering. Pub team. Thugs. Horrible to play against. Eye-bleedingly awful. Clugger's Quay Gonads. And so on.Yet, hang on a minute. Last night, a part time team from Wales, more than half of whom went back to real life as barmen, teachers, office workers and so on at 0900 this morning, despatched Scotland's third best team on their own patch, having been perhaps unlucky to lose the home leg to two late goals in their temporary European home of Rhyl (stop sniggering at the back). This comes a few months after pushing Ross County- the best team outside the Premier League last season- all the way in the final of the Irn Bru Cup , with their part time status counting against them in the end, in that match. This is the best result for a Welsh club side in Europe in a generation, ranking alongside famous wins from history, like Merthyr Tydfil humbling Atalanta at Penydarren Park in 1987 . The difference between Nomads' win last night and Merthyr, is that the Martyrs were ultimately eliminated in their return leg in Italy. Plus, Kilmarnock aren't Atalanta.Times have changed since a young Jock Stein signed his first professional contract at Llanelli . The Scots attitude to the Welsh game is one of casual indifference and contempt- a position made all the more untenable by the fact that the Welsh national team has been light years ahead of ours for at least a decade. I'm still mortified by the casual ease with which George Burley's awful national team were dismantled at the Cardiff City Stadium in 2009. Since then, the Welsh have featured in a European championship semi final whilst we were at home watching on television, again. The Wales national team- a downright laughing stock in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s (Bobby Gould and Vinnie Jones, anyone?) are now out of our sight, even if Ryan Giggs' incumbency as manager threatens to throw that whole process into sharp reverse.In any case we're not really talking about national teams here. Our contempt is still reserved for Welsh domestic football. According to us, by all accounts, it's a tinpot part-time league that no one watches. It's full of diddy teams who have no history so are happy to be named after private companies. Inter Cable-Tel. Flexsys Cefn Druids. Total Network Solutions. Airbus UK. In any case, the best Welsh teams still play in England. The Welsh care much more about rugby and there's no passion for football down there. (I stress for any casual Welsh reader that these are not my views, but absolutely commonplace on most terraces in Scotland). It reveals a level of hypocrisy in Scottish supports, raging at being dismissed by a much bigger neighbour in England as having a Mickey Mouse, quality-devoid league, yet quite happy to make the same judgement of Welsh domestic football from a similar position of near-complete ignorance.The little-remembered BBC Scotland sitcom about a Falkirk subbuteo team ( Playing for Real (1988) ) contains in miniature the Scots attitude to Welsh football. In one episode, the subbuteo team - delightfully named "Real Falkirk"-travels to South Wales to play a fixture against an impoverished team full of coal miners and choir members, whose club faces imminent bankruptcy. Despite local skullduggery, Real triumph with contemptuous ease, 5-1. If one was to put a quick summary of our views on Welsh football on a post-it note, the plot synopsis form this episode would suffice.It reflected an eighties when the Welsh football league members all flirted with death; Swansea City had their phones cut off and were minutes away from liquidation in 1986; Cardiff City suffered a calamitous double relegation under Alan Durban from 1986-88 and took well over a decade to recover, with crowds dropping as low as 2,000; Newport County lurched from crisis to crisis throughout the eighties and, having been taken over by a man subsequently jailed for fraud in the US, were eventually forced into liquidation in spring 1989, their only season in the Vauxhall Conference expunged from the records.There still are some staggering losses of fortune for formerly big names in the Welsh game; bankruptcy, loss of status and re-formation have affected variously Barry (now Barry Town United), Cwmbran Town (former top 3 Welsh Premier side, and serial European qualifiers, now subsisting at a very low level), Caernarfon ( tumbled down to just above parks football and bounced all the way back to the Premier League); Llanelli (bankrupt, re-formed), Rhyl (endless licensing problems), Bangor City (major existential crisis and fan-run breakaway club revolving around very controversial owners) Abergavenny Thursdays (League of Wales founders, long since disappeared following what seemed like twenty consecutive relegations).It's easy to make a glib comparison between Scotland and Wales as parts of the UK that are "not England"; to be honest, there the comparison ends. Until 1992 Wales' best sides played in the Football League or just below it; football in Wales beyond that system was largely amateur in nature, and was locally organised in a way not dissimilar to the Scottish junior game. In the last nearly thirty years, the foundation of the League of Wales (currently the JD Sports Welsh Premiership) has put the clubs not in England on a very firm semi-professional footing; the infrastructure and professionalism is developing continuously, and the league really seems to be improving year on year. Following S4C's Sgorio! weekly highlights from the Welsh Premier, isn't the worst waste of twenty minutes on the internet.In terms of atmosphere, the idea that it's all rugby in Wales and there's no passion for football is beyond absurd. Having been lucky enough to be present when Wales beat Italy in Cardiff in 2002 - big John Hartson slamming into the Italian centre-halfs like a bag of wet cement all night long and, the following year, watching Swansea survive in the Football League with a breathless 4-2 win over Hull City at the old Vetch , I can say that two of the best atmospheres at any ground in my football supporting life have been those two games.Around the turn of the century, I was at a game at Jenner Park between the old Barry Town and long-defunct Oswestry, which was one of the most boringly one sided games I've ever watched live. Fully professional Barry won around eight or nine one, I think, playing experienced full-timers such as Jamie Moralee (ex-Millwall) and Mike Flynn (currently Newport County's manager) against truly atrocious, feeble opposition. Those sorts of days are long gone now in the Welsh League. When I came back to live in Scotland in 2004, charitably, only this century's serial champions TNS might have survived in our then third division. Fifteen years on, and arguably, not only TNS but also Nomads and the new Barry Town United might survive in the Championship here and certainly would be top end League One contenders. That in itself is an illustration of the improvements in Welsh domestic football since then.A second hypocrisy can be found in accusations of Nomads being crude but effective. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard or read Scots fans dismissing, sagely observing thatand bellowing for the ball to be launched up the park quickly, or justifying an unrelentingly grim 1-0 triumph in a rain-drenched Methil along the lines ofIt seems this kind of crude but effective football is fine, as long as our team isn't on the receiving end of it.I suppose, in summary, the point of this lengthy aside is two-fold. Firstly, perhaps we should treat the Welsh game and league with the respect it deserves. Notions of Total Network Solutions and Barry Town running up double-digit gubbings of unfit village teams, on a weekly basis, are as obsolete as the Hillman Imp. The league has steadily improved year on year for the last while to the extent that it now matches up very creditably with our second and third tiers.Secondly, you might not like the way Connah's Quay Nomads play most of their football (although last night's first goal involved a move of twenty two passes that's hardly the trademark of a team of cloggers). However, Andy Morrison and his players, if they excel at something, is in their ability at getting the absolute last joule of energy and self-belief out of what they have at their disposal. Scots teams used to be past masters at that in European competition, but we lost that ability around the time Jim McLean retired.Upsets happen. Thisa really embarrassing result for Kilmarnock and for the Scottish game more widely. It leaves new manager Angelo Alessio in the eye of a media feeding frenzy, with dark mutterings already (absurd at this stage) that he's the wrong appointment, an Italian David Moyes. Maybe Nomads lucked out with a new manager taking charge of a club legend's players and not having had the time to get his message across to them. That would be only a small factor in their success.With the Challenge Cup still to come, I fancy this won't be the last time the Nomads upset Scottish football fans' weekends this season. Face it: the right to point and laugh at the perceived shortcomings / diddyness / tinpotness of clubs from other other leagues, let alone to expect to beat them by right, isn't in our repertoire as fans of the Scottish leagues, any more.