I was well jell seeing stars’ grins

Seeing the smiles on Premiership players’ faces on their return to training left me green with envy.

A couple of pals play in the top f light and seeing them put up photos of training and having a bit of craic on their Twitter feeds, you feel so jealous.

How dare those players have the audacity to be better a football than me and get to reap the rewards that come with it?

Surely I need the practice more than Scott Brown!

It’s gutting and it looks like it will still be some time yet before we join them.

I’ll just have to settle for football tennis. Being a teacher, I’ve borrowed a pop-up tennis net and a set of cones from the school and, with a mate, constructed a head tennis court on Leith Links as an outlet for our competitiveness.

It starts off good fun, then comes the bickering over rules.

Reassuringly, the touch hasn’t quite deserted me.

While reconstruction still dominates off the pitch, let’s think of changes we can make on it.

First, any accidental foul in the box, don’t give a penalty, give one of those indirect free-kicks with everyone on the line charging out.

You’d think it’d be a great opportunity for a bit of creativity yet it never is. It is just one touch, thunder blaster, every single time.

A great spectacle as long as you are not one of the men on the line.

Secondly, I’d allow alcohol back into games. The majority of Scottish fans, especially lower league, won’t cause any bother.

And if a tin gets chucked in my general direction, you’ll find me pretending to sip it. I can see the headline now: “Bayview benchwarmer drinks a can of beer”.

Lastly, ditch penalty shootouts and revert to the MLS in the 1990s and 10-second runs from halfway.

As someone who once argued with a team-mate over which one of us would be NINTH to step up, the instinctive nature of the run-up would be a blessing – although we better give my old mate Yano a minute.

Finally, a warm welcome to Thomas Collins who has joined East Fife. It must be a weird transition given we’ve all been reduced to WhatsApp instead of training to get to know each other.

Make some friends, ease yourself in then you can start slaughtering boys, that is the way I usually settle into a club.

It took me a month or two to start on the captain Kevin Smith and I haven’t stopped. In my defence, he is in my car school and hasn’t bought a coffee in a year.

And Ryan Wallace has already told our new arrival to watch what he says around me because it will end up in this column!