The urge for revenge must be suppressed

That the independent inquiry motion was going to fall in simple arithmetic terms was never really in doubt.

But the SPFL and Neil Doncaster needed more.

They needed a decisive enough majority to take the moral high ground as well as the mathematical one.

Anything close to a 50-50 split would have left the chief executive badly wounded, perhaps fatally, and with little option but to grant Rangers their resolution wish even though they didn’t have the required numbers.

So where does 27 against, 13 for and two abstentions leave us?

To my eyes it is with Doncaster and his board chastened but still with authority and credibility, albeit diluted, to put the episode behind them.

The majority of Scottish football clubs – and supporters in the country – will now want a bit of closure, not legal action and court cases.

There is a growing feeling that this has been an unsavoury and avoidable sideshow and the bigger, far more important, battle is to come. And that will be for the very survival of our professional leagues and the clubs within them.

Pulling together to face a crisis like no other will not be a given, though.

The Scottish game is no stranger to fall-outs and vendettas but the undisguised bitterness and animosity of the last few weeks has been, to use the most popular word of these coronavirus times, unprecedented.

Make no mistake, suppressing the urge for revenge will take a lot of willpower for some.