JACKO'S TOP CLASS EXCLUSIVE AND A SILLY BILLY

STAND up Keith Jackson, and take a bow for the best Scotland exclusive since...well, since your last one.

Now, as anyone knows, I think the Daily Record - which gives a column to George Galloway - is a rotten rag, and its plunging circulation figures show you all agree.

But credit where credit is due, and Keith Jackson's back page lead ,which lifted the lid off Craig Levein's both barrels rant at James McFadden and Kris Boyd at half time in that disgrace of a match against Liechtenstein, was a rare insight. Top class reporting.

The fact that Levein has not been out of the traps like a Shawfield odds on favourite to rubbish the story, merely serves to confirm just how copper bottom the tale is. Though I know, as any hack worth two bob also knows, that Jacko, however Wacko, would never have written it had he not been certain of of his facts.

Whatever happens now, and however many times however many folk may try to deny the story's authenticity, nobody will believe them. The tale is set in stone.

Which leaves Levein with a problem. For whatever is said inside the dressing room is meant to stay there. Its sanctity should equal that of the confessional. Or least, that's what every manager from Bill Nicholson to Craig Brown that I have dealt with has told me.

What Levein now faces is a squad full of players who will be worrying when a dip in form sees them next in line for the treatment at half time, and public humiliation.

There was no surprise in the news that Levein had borrowed Sir Alex Ferguson's hairdryer and turned it on Faddy. Plus Boyd.

After all, the Scotland manager had made his feelings about McFadden known when explaining why he was axed for the game in Lithuania, and again, in his post Liechtenstein match press conference  ,he put the boot into the Birmingham City man.

In doing so he was ignoring the wisdom of, and precedent set by, every Scotland manager I have dealt with professionally - a list which goes back to Ally MacLeod.

There would have been no chance of any of them - including the giants who have held the position, Jock Stein, Craig Brown, Walter Smith and Alex McLeish - making such a schoolboy mistake.

Levein may yet live to regret what he appears to have allowed to happen to McFadden, and to a lesser extent Boyd, and I will be surprised if he doesn't have to field calls from Big Eck and Gordon Strachan, two players who were always publicly protected at club and country level by managers of such stature as Stein and Sir Alex Ferguson.

None of which is - nor should it be - of any concern to the Daily Record's Keith Jackson. He got the exclusive, and that's what he is there for.

But, while doffing my old reporter's fedora to Wacko, what can we possibly say about the Silly Billy at the Record's rival?

For some guy at the Sun actually wrote that the Record was wrong, on the morning after the match, to describe Scotland's performance as an ABSOLUTE DISGRACE.

At least it was the wee Silly Billy's name on it. Though Levein himself could not have penned a better or more bitter piece of propoganda.

At least though Levein is a proper manager - if perhaps not as good a one as he thinks he is. For this particular sad wee Silly Billy is really just as wannabee who once allowed his pipe dream to get so much the better of him that he was spotted sitting on the bench next to Des McKeown, when the now Scotland spy was the manager of Stenhousmuir.

Not that I would wish any reader to take this as an attack on the Sun's sports section, which it most certainly is not. Ian King, the head of sport, does a superb job, and there are lots of fine and talented scribes to be found in his section.

Roger Hannah, Robert Grieve and Andy Devlin are Three Musketeers of Dumas class. It's just a pitty they have to share a page with such a Silly Wee Billy.

This is the man who suggested the Scots were gung ho at Hampden. Gung ho? With a back four against a solo striker, plus Lee McCulloch sitting in, five to ten yards in front of that rearguard.

This is the man who, in Thursday's Sun drivelled that he was only guessing that Levein might regret being talked out of sticking with the shape of his team in Lithuania.

Guessing? I can see he can't write. But can't he read either? After all, Levein said just that within an hour of the final whistle on Tuesday, and his comments were plastered all over every paper in the land, including the one from which Silly Billy steals a wage.

But, not content with telling us, on the Sun's sports pages, what was wrong with any critical comment about what good sound, solid and experienced observers reckoned was Scotland's worst competitive performance at Hampden in half a century, Wee Silly Billy then invaded the serious part of the paper to lecture us on Koran burning in America.

As a former Sun columnist might have written....YOU COULDN'T MAKE HIM UP.