Scott Brown’s legend grows by the day.
In midweek last week, he was photographed in Russia dressed like a guy who had just got off the plane in Majorca.
Even Zenit’s media team was impressed; they tweeted the picture with something like awe.
Brown is not just hard; if he was in the protection business Bear Grylls would be paying him a retainer.
He is having the time of his life in a Celtic shirt right now, which is makes the news that he’s decided to end his involvement with the Scotland squad all the sweeter to hear.
Who can deny that this guy will go down in history, not only as one of the lynch-pins of the modern team but as one of the best captains we’ve ever had? He is the on-field maestro who pulls the strings. He runs through walls. He chews up metal and spits out nails.
He is the scariest thing Scottish football has seen since Davie Dodds was last seen out without his hood up.
Yesterday, not only did he give another peerless display but when the vicious tackle from Cosgrove came in, and Logan petulantly battered the ball off him, there was no feeling sorry for himself or piece of amateur dramatics.
He got up.
And he bellowed his defiance, with a big grin on his face.
It was a fantastic TV moment, to make your heart swell.
Shit, that is our captain out there, people.
Our captain.
It makes you want to boast about it to every person you meet this week. “Did you see that? That’s our guy.”
I mean, what did the Aberdeen players think would happen?
That he would roll around on the grass like Kenny McLean spent much of the game doing?
That man was so weak yesterday that Mr Muscle would have knocked seven shades out of him.
McLean pretends to be a tough guy, until he’s challenged. Then the theatrics start. Brown is the Real Thing. Joey Barton thought he would come up here and dominate; Brown so psyched him out in the tunnel before they even got onto the pitch that Barton was looking at the deck as Brown filed past him. Owned, before a ball was kicked.
Which is to say nothing for the way he was bullied once the football actually did start.
Barton too has lived off a rep as a tough guy; Brown showed him what hard really was.
For all El Hadji Diouff did the self-promotion thing, his legend was based on the time he spat on a wee lassie in the crowd. When Scott Brown got in his face that famous day at Ibrox he shrunk back like a kid who’d been leapt out at on Halloween.
Yesterday was the quintessential Scott Brown moment, and I know how that was received on websites like SevcoMedia.
They hate this guy with a passion that only Neil Lennon’s Irish background can supersede.
If Brown had been born across the water, in the Six Counties, their loathing for him would blow thermometers to pieces.
Clubs spend years looking for a guy like this. We might not find an adequate replacement for him for years; a guy who talks but so often delivers on that talk. A guy who plays without fear. Who stands up to provocation with a smile, and pays back every dig with one of his own. A guy who haunts the dreams of feeble, less secure, individuals like Craig Levein. If you shoot Scott Brown in a dream you better wake up and apologise.
Of course he got up and roared yesterday.
How else is a lion supposed to respond to being savaged by a sheep?
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