Chick Young's view

By Chick Young BBC Scotland football correspondent

The good Lord hasn't really got the hang of this. He really shouldn't keep taking all the good guys.

Poor Tommy. Snatched from us ridiculously early. It is scandalously unfair, this evil business of cancer.

A gentleman, that's what he was. Old school and straight as the day is long. God-fearing but blessed with astonishing courage in every other way.

"He had an impish grin and a twinkle in his eyes"

He had an impish grin and a twinkle in his eyes...which was all they were good for actually.

Tommy Burns might have been a man of vision when it came to football, but not until he had been to Specsavers. But he even saw the funny side of that.

He once confessed to me that as a lad, he used to go to a club in St Enoch Square and if he met a girl he always took her for chips on the way home.

"Why?" I asked. "Because," he said, "the nightclub was dark but in the chip shop the fluorescent lighting allowed me to have a right good look at her!"

You always left Tam with a smile on your face. He talked about the beautiful game beautifully, he loved it with a passion.

He adored life too. Much too much to be robbed of it.

He loved Celtic but he hated bigotry. Idiots were idiots for him, were they were clothed in green and white or red, white and blue. And he was one of the few who bridged the great divide.

You couldn't find a decent soul on this planet with the help of Interpol who had a bad word to say about him.

It would have tickled him pink that Rangers fans had the class and dignity to drive straight from Manchester to Celtic Park to lay strips and flags to honour his memory.

MY SPORT: DEBATE Tommy and his team with Cadete, Di Canio Thom etc was the reason i become a Celtic Fan. RD - 2007

And he would have been fair chuffed that watching Celtic fans had the class to applaud the act.

In a season plagued again by Old Firm hatred maybe, after all, there is hope out there.

What a loss, what a needless, unfair, dreadful loss.

I'll tell you this. The torment felt by Walter Smith and Alistair McCoist at the taking of their friend underlines how pathetically irrelevant it is that a football match was lost. Even of the magnitude of a Uefa final.

Rangers did the decent thing in cancelling the parade through the streets of Kinning Park, although it would have been outrageous if they hadn't. It all seemed a bit pathetic in any case.

An open top bus with no silverware to twinkle in the southside sunshine. A victorious homecoming without the, err...victory.

And onwards to Ibrox and a home that threatens to take on the look of a house of cards. The quadruple gone, with the domestic treble rumbling at its foundations.

Rangers will need focus and mental strength to drag themselves into the outside lane and beyond Celtic to the championship finishing line.

Three must-win league games and a Scottish Cup final in eight pulsating days. Oh, the madness of it all.

They will need to dig deep for new resolve and untapped energy while Celtic hover, poised to pick their carcass on the last dramatic summer's night.

Manchester is history, there will be time for reflection when the blur of this season is over.

What a season it has been. It has ripped at our emotions and torn at our heart-strings.

But it has reminded us yet again that this game of ours is not at all a matter of life and death, or anything like it.

Walter Smith and his team have done this country proud, lifted its soul in a fabulous campaign and made us smile. Anyone who joined them on their journey will drink to that.

And while you're at it, lift your glass to Tam Burns.

He did exactly the same.