For long enough people have believed that the SFA, as a governing body, represent an unholy cabal of tinpot dictators whose rule over Scottish football seemed more than antiquated. Well, if they have a case, the agitators are about to have their liberator. As I write I can hear Craig Levein dusting down his Tolpuddle Martyrs' script and boning up on Martin Luther King.

Levein might not represent one of the greatest campaigns for justice in the world, but the way he has the SFA on the run is still an interesting sideshow. Tomorrow afternoon a body of men called a General Purposes Committee is due to choke on the fact that Levein is steadfastly refusing to pay a (pounds) 4000 SFA fine, for which, so is the aim, it will attempt to ban the Hearts manager from the touchline for four months.

There's only one snag with this plan, as David Taylor, chief executive of the SFA, knows only too well. It is this: the world has moved on from this type of authoritarian, swingeing justice and Scottish football had better wise up to it. Levein is refusing to pay, and Taylor, to this observer always a fair and decent man, still looks like someone whose neck is growing redder.

Everyone knows what Levein, the dreadful felon, got up to. In his characteristically intelligent, measured way, the Hearts manager alleged

that the referee, Dougie McDonald, had performed particularly poorly in a match at Rugby Park last season, during which Hearts had two players sent off. Levein may have been right or he may have been wrong in that estimation but the point is this . . . imagine any kangaroo court issuing a fine for expressing an opinion.

The SFA are in trouble on two counts. The first is in the very personality of Levein himself, probably the most modern in thought and deed of all the current SPL managers. In the old Jock Wallace days, when most football managers didn't know the difference between effluence and affluence, the SFA had a field day doling out fines for every intemperate malapropism in the book.

But things are different today. Men like Levein, Martin O'Neill and Alex McLeish have come along, football figures who, though they are all steeped in the game, have a more worldly, even a more cultured, perspective. The days, to be unkind about it, of the half-wit manager bawling like an agitated gorilla are on the wane, barring one or two outstanding specimens.

In Levein, the SFA have a specific case of a respectable, articulate coach saying simply: ''Excuse me. . . but don't treat me like an idiot.''

The second area in which the SFA are in a stew concerns a far more concrete playground: that of the law. As people within the SFA are already hinting, if this hanging-offence goes to an outside court, as some believe Levein is intending it to, I wouldn't like to be QC for the SFA which begs the judge: ''But M'lud, for these criticisms of refs we've always slapped a fine.'' The more you think about it, the more absurd it is.

I fear Levein, by late tomorrow, may not have stumped up a bawbee to the SFA, far less their cash-settlement for (pounds) 4000. After that, should the SFA seek to ban him, which would be extremely hurtful to Levein and Hearts, the so-called ''offender'' may be moved to hit the SFA with a counter-injunction himself. Either way, we are witnessing the last days of the Raj.

Levein snubs SFA, Page 30