DERMOT DESMOND

THIS is what sports writers call a ''Scotland week,'' and is something they always look forward to as a chance to break out of the same old Old Firm round of interviews.

However, suddenly Celtic's billionaire owner Dermot Desmond has put his head above the parapet to raise just about the hoariest of same old, same old chesnuts..... the Old Firm joining the English Premiership.

First things first. One of my colleagues who attends the Masters in Augusta every year always takes the opportunity to confront Desmond there - politely as he's a well brought up lad - with the request for an interview. Every year he is met with a refusal.

Perhaps Desmond prefers to speak to a soundbite chasing radio man, as opposed to a journalist who would be certain to ask penetrating and pertinent questions. I don't know the answer to that one.

What I do know is the idea of the Old Firm upping sticks, quitting Scotland and playing in the top flight in England will not happen in my lifetime.

And I aim to be around for a fair few years, despite the threat from some keyboard warrior nutter to shoot me.

It's more than a decade now since the story started gathering pace in the media south of the border, leading to the London based Sunday newspaper sports editor who was my boss badgering me for stories about it.

Now, this particular sports editor was not the one who refused to publish my eye witness account of what I saw in Manchester, just before he went on the run as the Met's Fraud Squad closed in on him.

No, this gaffer, who has deserverdly gone on to bigger and better things, was willing to listen to me. And what I told him then still holds good today.

NUMBER ONE - The English Premiership is a hugely successful league and has no need of the Old Firm to boost its financial worth.

NUMBER TWO - FIFA - not UEFA as so many of my less well informed colleagues continue to say hold sway on this matter - would not tolerate it, as it would open the floodgates for large clubs in Holland moving to Germany, Belgium to France, and Portugal to Spain, as well as Chile to Argentina etc etc.

NUMBER THREE - The clubs in the bottom half of the Premiership would hardly vote to make their own survival tougher in the that gold mine. The vote of 20-0 against the Old Firm, taken long ago, would be repeated again if taken tomorrow.

My boss told me to write just that, which I did, and on each subsequent occasion when the idea resurfaced he asked me if anything had changed, and on being told by me that it hadn't, agreed the subject wasn't worth last week's fish and chip paper.

Yet here we have Desmond, who I get the feeling likes to think of himself as a bit of a wheeler dealer on football's big stage, popping up with it again.

Sure, there may be the odd geezer south of the border, Bolton's Phil Garside was one a few months ago, who will refloat the idea, perhaps even trying to find a backdoor way in via the Championship.

NUMBER FOUR -  Championship clubs are hardly going to want to make it harder to gain entry to that Premiership pot on gold by bringing in the Old Firm as serious competition.

Which takes us back to the Celtic owner and what many may believe to be his pie-in-the-sky statement on the airwaves, and a question which many have asked over many years.

Why is it that when succcessful, high powered and extremely rich businessmen enter the world of football, they appear to leave all their business acumen behind them?

But back let's get back to where we started, and the ''Scotland week.''

And one man to give Desmond a run for his money in the last few days has been Scotland's still to be tried and tested at this level, manager Craig Levein.

His revelation that he had made an attempt to tempt Newcastle's Nigerian born striker, Shola Ameobi to become a ''Scot'' on the strength of the fact he holds a British passport amazed me on a couple of levels.

To begin with the idea that Scotland should go in search of mercenaries to join the colours appals me. It's bad enough that we take advantage of FIFA rules to cap players who were born in England - or any other country - neither of whose parents  are Scottish, and who have only one grandparent who is a Scot.

But to actively seek to cap someone who hasn't even muched a roll 'n square slice? It's almost too terrible for words.

There is though a more practical aspect to this saga which is even more worrying, and which the Scottish Football Association's PR machine - which is much more media savvy these days - has managed to divert attention from.

This problem first arose when a young reporter who was pally with Rangers' calamity captain, Lorenzo Amoruso, got the Italian, who was nowhere near good enough to play for Italy, talking on a slow news day about his desire to don the dark blue.

The FIFA rule says that if a player has lived in a country long enough and hold that's nation's passport, he qualifies to play for it.

In the peculiar case of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, this means any of the Home Countries can pick such a player.

The SFA politely declined by Amo's offer, but some time later the same hack went to Nacho Novo - there are a lot of slow news days for the tabloid headline hunters - and produced the same tale. Only the names had been changed.

By this time the excellent Gordon Smith was the SFA chief executive and he stamped on the silliness and brokered an official deal with the FA in London and its counterparts in Belfast and Cardiff, a so called gentlemen's agreement, that none of the Home Associations would take advantage of this disgraceful FIFA rule.

At the time the story was given wide ranging coverage. That means the tabloids, the middlemarket papers, the heavies, radio and television gave it prominence, not just here, but in England, Wales and Ulster too.

Granted Levein was not in charge of the Scotland team at the time, but it was a story which was hard to miss, and difficult to confuse with the one with Andy Driver at its centre, which is an entirely different matter.

Of course, none of this will matter should Scotland return from Lithuania in the early hours of Saturday morning with three European Championship qualifying points in the bag ,and then double their tally by seeing off Lichtenstein at Hampden on Tuesday night.

For me, the opening four matches must harvest at least seven points, and the best way to reach that tally is by winning the first two ties and drawing in the Czech Republic next month, as the fourth outing is when World Champions , Spain visit Hampden .

First things first, though. And who knows, after this ''Scotland week'' is finished some of my press pals may turn their attention to Dermot Desmond, and explain the facts of football life to him.