For everyone involved in Scottish football, the end of 2009 cannot come quickly enough. A depressing, dispiriting year for the game both at club and international level draws to a close and is best, as they say, consigned to the dustbin of history.
Any doubts about just how far standards have plummeted were erased with this season's European campaigns, which started badly before deteriorating. Falkirk's Europa League hopes ended at their first qualifying hurdle in July with an extra-time defeat to Liechtenstein side Vaduz.
That set the tone for summer of discontent. Motherwell exited on a 6-1 aggregate to Steaua Bucharest, Hearts lost 4-2 on aggregate to Dinamo Zagreb and Aberdeen fell in the most humiliating way to Czech side Sigma Olomouc, with a record 5-1 home defeat in the first leg.
The Old Firm were next in to European action. They had fought out their annual battle for the title with Rangers coming out on top, thus gaining automatic qualification in to the group stages of the Champions League. However, the old joke about the Glasgow giants' battle for national supremacy being akin to two bald men fighting for a comb has never seemed so apt.
Europe, once a gateway to glory for the Old Firm, is in danger of becoming an annual misery, sweetened only by financial compensation. The Scottish champions, still looking for a new owner, set a record low points total for a Champions League campaign as they lurched from humiliation to embarrassment.If the 4-1 home defeat to Spanish side Seville was perhaps understandable if no less painful, the same scoreline at Ibrox against Romanian unknowns Unirea Urziceni was simply ridiculous.
Celtic's Champions League qualifying defeat by Arsenal highlighted the unbridgeable chasm between north and south of the border. Though the Hoops somehow managed to drop out of a Europa League group that had two places up for grabs and which was won by Hapoel Tel Aviv.
We won't see Scottish clubs in Europe for another seven months but more time than that is needed for wounds to heal.
At international level we were left to reflect on another failure to qualify for a major tournament.
George Burley's side were handed a kind draw with Holland, Norway, Macedonia and Iceland but the campaign was ill-fated, to say the least. The 'Boozegate' shenanigans which ultimately ended with Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor banned from international football, revealed how little professionalism there is in Scottish football. Scotland's results merely confirmed it. The 3-0 friendly defeat by Wales in Cardiff in November ended Burley's reign with Craig Levein recruited in to the Hampden hot seat from Dundee United just before Christmas.
Things can only get better, as someone once sang, but is that true? The draw for the 2012 European Championships takes place in February with Levein's first competitive game in September. Hands up those who genuinely believe the former Hearts and Leicester boss can take Scotland to its first major finals since the 1998 World Cup?
At this time of the year the Scottish psyche almost demands to be optimistic about what lies ahead.
There are plenty who claim our football is not as bad as it is made out and will improve because, well, just because. ost of the optimists, of course, are owners, managers, coaches and players.
Anyone with a contrary view is accused of being too negative. But try as you might not to be curmudgeonly, there is simply no evidence to suggest short-term or medium-term improvement.
There are fundamental problems which need addressed. Coaching, pricing, facilities and the football calendar, for starters. On his anointment at Hampden, Levein asked for the game to be defended and to be talked up. However, even the Tartan Army refused to be enthused by the big Fifer's rallying cry.
The best-case scenario that one fans' spokesman could come up with was a return to the times of Walter Smith and Alex McLeish when Scotland were "well organised and hard to beat." Fast becoming a Scottish football mantra, the phrase basically means getting 10 men behind the ball and trying to nick a goal. Is that the extent of our ambition these days? Is entertainment simply not on the menu any more? Have we simply given up?
On the domestic front, it is set to be a case of same old, same old. Celtic and Rangers will battle for the SPL title as usual with Hibs perhaps looking the best of the rest, although their 4-1 spanking at home to the Ibrox side on Sunday after getting a goal of a start shows how far they still have to go before they are a genuine threat.
We will talk about reaching a top-six spot as if it is a genuine achievement and we will eulogise the battling qualities of the clubs down at the bottom who avoid the drop. Maybe the penny has dropped, though. Old Firm fans appear to be joining their Tartan Army counterparts in their apathy, most noticeably at Celtic where gates are tumbling. Parkhead could barely have been half-full for the visit of Hamilton on Saturday.
Interest will probably return as the championship race speeds towards its conclusion. But regardless of who wins the SPL and which other teams qualify for Europe, does anyone really believes Scottish club will be any better equipped to compete in Europe next season?
Indeed, with the 2010/11 SPL season set to start in mid-August, aside from the club which qualifies automatically for the Champions League - and that will be a thing of the past soon - all our teams could be out of Europe before the new league campaign begins. And the heads will go back in the sand.
Like every football fan, Levein has his own ideas of how he can shake up Scottish football and he will attempt to put them in to practise but in fact, the latest inquest is already underway. Former First Minister and East Fife player, Henry McLeish, is in the midst of a "thorough and extensive" review of Scottish football.
He will report on phases one and two by the end of January. Work on phase three will begin after this, and a series of recommendations will be made. It will make for interesting reading. However, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is a phrase that immediately springs to mind.
