WE Scots are supposed to be a philosophical race. We never get our hopes up too far because they are constantly dashed, and having made a national trait of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, we confront with pure reason the vagaries of our sporting fates in particular.

Neverthless, you would need to be a Socrates, Aristotle, or Plato to make sense of what happened to Scotland at the end of Saturday’s game. Just when it looked as though we had pulled off a totally improbable victory, Harry Kane’s volleyed goal put us back in philosophical mood big time. Had he been watching, perhaps only the greatest of all Scottish philosophers, David Hume, would have known what to say – stercus accidit,* as he allegedly once wrote.

So what has the great master of the Scottish Enlightenment got to do with Craig Whyte, Rangers and the Scottish national team? Simple – Hume was the ultimate sceptic and he would certainly not have believed the events and revelations of the last few weeks as Whyte stood trial for fraud and was acquitted.

Some of the evidence during the trial was jaw-dropping. A week on, it is very educational to look back at the reports of the prosecution evidence and what Donald Findlay QC in particular elicited from the Crown witnesses.

Findlay was quite brilliant in his tactics, as superb a defender in the cause of his client Whyte as, say, John Greig or the late Sandy Jardine were for Rangers on the pitch.

As the club’s former vice-chairman, Findlay knew where the bones were hid and opened up huge skeleton-filled closets with question after question that exposed the self-serving nature of much of the evidence given against Whyte. Basically, Findlay said that the Crown witnesses just couldn’t be trusted and a majority of the jury agreed with him.

He did not prove conclusively that Sir David Murray and the Murray Group executives and the board of Rangers all knew about the Ticketus deal by Whyte before the sale was concluded but he didn’t have to. He just cast enough doubt on the actions and recall of Murray and others so that the jury concluded that his client was not guilty as charged. Yet the trial’s most outstanding admission came from Murray. When quizzed about the Employee Benefit Trust tax ‘avoidance’ system – it may yet be classed tax evasion by the UK Supreme Court – used by the club between 2001 and 2010, Murray said: “It gave us an opportunity to get players that we may otherwise not have been able to afford.”

Wow – that’s a lulu. The whole point about Rangers’ defence of the EBT system was that it was a tax avoidance scheme that anyone could use and it didn’t give them that much of an advantage yet now the former owner has admitted on oath that it most certainly did. That may yet come back to haunt Murray and Rangers.

The trial was memorable as much for what wasn’t said as for what was said. I would have loved to have heard what current chairman Dave King would have said had he been called. Remember, he was a director of oldco Rangers throughout the whole time that Sir David Murray was trying to sell it, and indeed made a counter-offer to stop Whyte getting in. Now we’ll never know what he really felt at the time.

So what’s all that got to do with Scotland’s national team?

Look at the squad that was picked by Gordon Strachan for the England game. Not a single player came from Rangers despite their return to the Premiership.

Look at these other statistics. Since Whyte led Rangers into administration in early 2012, the number of Rangers players capped for their Scotland is four – Ian Black (once) and Allan McGregor in 2012 shortly before they left the club, Lee Wallace with four to date and Barrie McKay’s sole appearance in June last year. Of that quartet, only McKay came through the training system at Auchenhowie. Kenny Miller’s last cap came when he was still at Vancouver Whitecaps, it should be noted.

By contrast, in the five years before the collapse of oldco Rangers, there were plenty of Rangers players in the Scotland first XI and squad – McGregor, Barry Ferguson, Allan Hutton, Lee McCulloch, Davie Weir and Kevin Thomson all spring to mind.

Look also at the Ibrox players since early 2012 who have played for other countries – Sone Aluko, Fraser Aird, Marius Zaliukas, Myles Beerman, Dean Shiels, Lee Hodson, Bilehl Mosni, Maurice Edu and Carlos Bocanegra gives a double handful.

Not one of the Scottish players currently at Rangers was considered good enough by Gordon Strachan to play on Saturday. Admittedly Lee Wallace might have been left out as he probably had his nuptials on his mind, but even then he would have been behind Andrew Robertson and Kieran Tierney for a full back position.

It used to be that Rangers always contributed two, three or sometimes a handful of players to the Scotland team, but that simply has not been the case since 2012.

The Whyte trial showed the ‘buy foreign, buy big’ sickness that was endemic at Rangers for many years. The Scottish national set-up has suffered as a result, and will go on doing so for years to come, so Hell mend Murray, Whyte and all their minions that brought Rangers so low and betrayed Scotland.

*Sh-t happens.