HAMILTON Accies are the First Division champions on merit, having consistently stayed ahead of their promotion rivals for some time. And Billy Reid, their manager, deserves his share of the credit for the club's successful campaign.
But does that mean Reid deserves to be named PFA Scotland manager of the year, as he was at the weekend? Or was the vote of his fellow-professionals premature at best?
Let's face it, while winning the First Division is an admirable achievement, it
happens every season to someone. In that sense, it's unavoidable. Not a year goes by without a club finishing top of the pile in the second flight.
It's the same in the SPL too, of course, and there is certainly no reason why Gordon Strachan or Walter Smith, managers of Celtic and Rangers respectively, should automatically be preferred to Reid.
But there are circumstances in which both might come to be seen as more worthy recipients of the PFA Scotland award than Reid, and while in the case of Strachan those circumstances are highly unlikely to arise, they are odds on to do so for Smith.
Celtic would not only have to win the league, but do so in remarkable style, for the shortcomings of their season to be disregarded, and for their manager to be hailed by the country's players as the outstanding individual in his position.
Given the improbability of that scenario, and the practical fact that not every awards dinner can wait until the last kick of the ball, it is just about acceptable that Strachan's hypothetical claim to be manager of the year has been overlooked.
Smith, on the other hand, is in a quite different position.
It could be argued that Reid, given his comparable lack of resources, has been more impressive in taking his team to their divisional championship than Smith will have done should Rangers win the SPL. But Smith already has one trophy in the bag, and will surely end up with more.
In fact, he could end up with four – the league, the Scottish Cup and the Uefa Cup, in addition to the CIS Cup which is at Ibrox already.
If Rangers do triumph in all of them, would there be a single PFA member who could honestly say he thought Reid had done more as a manager?
If they 'only' end up with three prizes instead of four, the same question could be asked.
The treble is a rare event in Scottish football, and when it does occur it is a sure indication that one team, and one manager, has done significantly better than every other one in the land.
Or let's set our sights a bit lower. Let's imagine, as it is all too easy to do when you look at how Fiorentina have been playing, that Rangers are eliminated in the Uefa Cup semi-final.
Let's presume, in addition, that the fixture backlog continues to take its toll, and that they also fail to win one of the other competitions in which they still have an interest. With two trophies, Smith would still have a strong claim to be manager of the year.
In fact, let's go further still. Rangers lose to Fiorentina in the Uefa Cup and to Queen of the South in the final of the Scottish Cup.
Plagued by injuries, fatigue and the odd suspension, they can scrape together no more than a couple of draws from those games in hand they have on Celtic, and lose out on the title too.
Yet, given even such a melodramatic situation, Rangers would still obviously be the team of the season.
Their failure to win more than one trophy would be caused largely by the force of circumstance, and could not be ascribed to any inadequacy on the part of their manager.
In other words, whatever happens between now and the end of the season, there is already a strong, close-to-unanswerable case for naming Smith as manager of the year.
And, given Rangers remain favourites to take the treble, it is probable that that case will be stronger still come the end of next month.
If his team win three or four tournaments, Smith will lose no sleep over his 'failure' to be named PFA Scotland manager of the year, but that is by the by.
The point is that any organisation which sets itself up as an assessor of success by handing out prizes loses credibility if it is significantly wide of the mark.
With all due respect to Reid, the decision by the PFA's members to name him as manager of the year appears motivated less by a positive regard for his achievement than by a disinclination to acknowledge what Smith has done.
The full article contains 804 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
