Rangers run to Seville shows it's time Scottish clubs got over the European football inferiority complex - Keith Jackson

Because, over the years, Scottish football has developed a regrettable habit for humiliating itself whenever it’s allowed out of the country and the fact that Kilmarnock were duly eliminated by such inauspicious cannon fodder merely served to hammer home the point.

A career low point? Is there any other way of looking at it? Banned. By Connah’s Quay Nomads. Granted, in this game, the occasional blackballing comes with the territory. It wasn’t that long ago your humble correspondent was considered persona non grata at Celtic Park for suggesting that the appointment of Ronny Deila was perhaps not one of Peter Lawwell’s shrewdest decisions.

And it was the same sin die treatment at Ibrox when critical of Pedro Caixinha. A week or two later he was muttering something about dogs and caravans as the wheels were coming off in spectacular style – having already been papped out of the Europa League qualifiers by Progres Niederkorn. The image of Caixinha remonstrating with his club’s irate supporters afterwards from the middle of a Luxembourgian bush, is a shivering reminder of how our game got into such a sorry state in the first place.

That’s one of the reasons why, in that pride swallowing summer of 2019, Kilmarnock, Celtic, Rangers and Aberdeen were all being lumped in with European football’s no hopers in the dross v dross eliminators.

Before the tennis was over and the golf had even started. Rangers faced the might of St Joseph’s of Gibraltar that same week in the first round of Europa League qualifiers. Celtic squared up to FK Sarajevo and survived a couple of rounds before eventually being knocked out by Cluj.

The Champions League got up and running later that summer without them. Aberdeen scraped through against RoPS