When is a story not a story?

Answer: When it's about the Old Firm and broadcast by Scotland’s ”premier” news programmes?

Well, we all remember the non-story that was Marco Negri's squash injury that seem to go on longer than Bryan Adams run at number 1 in the summer of 69, er, I mean, 1991. Tonight's television was no exception with Reporting Scotland giving us the hot-off-the-press report that Shaun Maloney had been stretchered off during an Under-21 game this afternoon against Partick Thistle. Big news indeed.

Had the Bhoy's benchwarmer broken a limb or lost an eye or, heaven forbid, scored a barrelload of goals? No, he'd twisted his knee. Now, I ask you, would it have been a story if it had been Hearts' Robert Sloan or Hibs' Kevin Nicol had suffered the same injury?

Players in similar positions, that of will-only-get-a game-when-others-are-injured, at other SPL clubs wouldn't have been given such airtime so why Maloney? The cynical amongst you must suggest that he only got mentioned because he plays for one of the Old Firm. How could you say such a thing?

Maybe the column inches were merited by a plethora of appearances in the dark blue of Scotland. Er, wrong! So just how did it merit airtime when goals from the weekend's matches were omitted?

I don't suppose that I'm the only person who likes to use Reporting Scotland to catch up with the goals from the weekend. Most people will miss the goals being shown at 5pm on a Saturday as they're still coming back from the games. However, more and more of the weekend action, particularly from non-Old Firm games, is being lost to make way for interviews with O'neill and McLeish or multiples replays of Old Firms efforts.

A recent complaint to the powers that be at Reporting Scotland about the lop-sided reporting of Scottish football met with a predictable response. Apparently, "the purpose of Reporting Scotland is not simply to look back at the weekend's matches or to compare injuries." Fair enough but where's the balance?

You wouldn't get away with this sort of coverage of the 12 main political parties (if there was 12) so why single out 2 teams when the top division consists of 10 other equally newsworthy sides? Answers on a postcard to: Diarmid O'Hara, Editor, Reporting Scotland, Weedja Meedja Land, Glasgow.