By Chick Young BBC Scotland football correspondent

The SFA chiefs are at cross-purposes with the SPL over fixtures

A result just in: SPL 1 SFA 0.

Or, to put it another way, you can stick your international team and its ambitions where the sun don't shine.

The three-horse race which is the Blazers' Stakes is trampling all over the hopes and dreams of the Tartan Army.

The SPL, the SFA and the SFL are so full of their own self-interest they are ripping the game apart. To be fair the Scottish League might be innocent of all charges on this one, but one sport into three governing bodies still doesn't go.

I don't know if you've noticed, but we're bad enough without the handicap of the SPL launching their season four days before Scotland travel to Norway to play what could be THE key fixture of the bid to reach South Africa next summer.

George Burley has already been actively discouraged from arranging a friendly match this midweek while the rest of the planet goes about the business of the international game.

Why? Because the Old Firm play on Sunday and he knows fine well that had he announced a squad he would have had a battalion going AWOL without so much as a note from their mums.

The manager gets my sympathy vote on this one, helped not at all by the comments of the former Scotland goalie Andy Goram who claims the get-together at St Andrews is a waste of time and that if they tried it in his day he wouldn't have trapped.

Apparently the one-time Rangers keeper needed a week to psyche himself up for the Old Firm match.

Burley must wonder if he has any wind at his back.

A fleeting glance across the North Sea won't help.

The Norwegians - whose season will be in full swing - have cleared the decks for 10 days ahead of the tie but then they have no conflict of interests given that the game over there is run by one body.

The English are of no help. Like us they have enough bodies to populate a small village, and the Championship - where most of our players put on their working clothes - is likely to kick off the same weekend as the SPL.

Fifa, of course, already ordered a date change to this fixture without so much as by-you-leave to fans who arranged time off work, booked flights and ferries and saved two months worth of salaries just so they could buy four beers and a bag of crisps in an Oslo bar.

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And here's another curiosity: while poor George sweats it out on that first Saturday of the season waiting to see how many of his players will be crocked, his lovely assistants will actually be toiling at the coalface of the SPL� depending on how the relegation issue works out of course.

Big Tel - the most successful English Butcher in the Highlands since the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden - will presumably still be guiding the ship at Inverness and Steven Pressley will likewise not have left the building at Falkirk.

There are a lot of people - and many who will read this - who don't care that the national team take the second prize in this country. Club football is king for them and they are entitled to their opinion.

But for those of us with a passion for Scotland and for international football and who are old enough to remember the glow of happiness that embraces the nation when we do qualify for a World Cup, it's a deflating, infuriating state of affairs.

For the moment, Scotland are on the back burner. Next stop is the deep freeze.

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