The eyes of Scottish football have been turned towards Pittodrie since last Wednesday night.

And what we appear to have now in the SPFL is a title race.

You know, the big stories of the day do not always have to involve Celtic and Rangers. I am of an age to remember the era when Dundee United and Aberdeen were very successful sides in the 1980s but it seems as though anyone under 30 who follows Scottish football cannot give any credence to any other team outwith the Old Firm winning the title.

I cover football in Germany, in Holland, in France and in recent seasons there have been upsets there too. Where it has not been as straightforward as it has been in the past.

But the thing about Scotland is that we have a tendency always to focus on the negative.

That it is February and Celtic’s lead at the top of the league is only three points is something that we should relish. We have an Aberdeen team who have beaten them twice this season – and beaten them pretty comprehensibly.

It is an Aberdeen side who have beaten the defending champions twice in a season and what a result like that does is give the players at that club the belief that they can go on and achieve something that few would ever have given them a hope of.

What do we want? In England and further afield, this is something that would be cause for celebration.

We have a league that is interesting, lively, exciting and will carry a few twists and turns before the end of the season.

I totally understand that if you are a Celtic fan you might not be entirely happy at this turn of events. But this is football. This is what we want – competition, pressure, drama.

This is the nature of it. It does not happen that a club gets stronger year after year. There are peaks and troughs, good times and tough times and that is what it means to follow a football team.

But where we fall down in Scotland, I think, is to belittle that. Whoever you support, you have to get behind the idea that this season we have a league that enjoyable and that will have people looking at our game and wondering if maybe there could be a genuine upset.

Certainly, Derek McInnes, whatever he says publicly, will privately feel that he will never have a better chance of being the first non-Old Firm manager since Sir Alex Ferguson in 1985 of winning the Championship.

I firmly believe that what he is saying publicly and what he is saying in the privacy of his own dressing room will be two entirely different things.

It is all well and good to tell the media that everyone expects Celtic to win the league – which they do – but having seen Celtic off twice this term, he will know that his own squad of players will be imbued with a sense of confidence and belief that they can push Celtic this season.

I am not for a minute suggesting that they expect it will happen, but they have certainly asked the question.

We tend to look at our game through the prism of expecting no points to be dropped but that is not what this season is going to be about.

And if anyone at Celtic is shouting about not being worried about a title race then they are telling fibs because there is a challenge from the north this season.