THERE are times when you wake up and you just know how to solve all the problems of the world. It’s to do with dreaming and the subconscious mind and how it works to help our brains deal with the nonsense that we confront everyday of our lives.

If you are involved in football, even just writing about it, you get to see a lot of nonsense, especially if you can be bothered to look at the many websites and social media outlets that appear to have been particularly designed to allow the witless to spout forth their idiocies.

If you write a newspaper column about sport of one kind or another as I have done for more than 25 years, you get taken to task on a regular basis, and certainly in recent years the online criticism of sportswriters including myself has become much more corrosive and at times deeply unpleasant, especially when you write about Celtic or Rangers.

Hey ho, I’m a big boy and can take it, and I always comfort myself with the fact that my name and face is attached to this column. That gives me a huge moral advantage over the anonymous trolls that populate so many football websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

I have written before about anonymity. I can quite understand the case of, say, a Celtic fan working among Rangers fans or vice-versa, who wants to stay anonymous. Politically, the same goes for a nationalist working among Unionists or vice-versa. Sadly, the days when such a workplace situation was an excuse for humour and banter appears to have long since gone.

In keeping with the ongoing decline of civilised standards in our modern society, every eejit with a laptop or smartphone with access to social media seems to think they can peddle their usually worthless opinion, or just swearie words, as if they are Holy Writ. Mostly, they are another word that rhymes with writ and starts with “sh”. But that’s the price we pay for freedom of speech – some people just don’t know how to use that precious freedom properly.

These past few days have seen robust exchanges of viewpoints about the so-called cybernats who troll people online – a tiny, tiny fraction of independence supporters, I must say, and vastly outnumbered by the Unionist trolls whose vitriol is 10 times worse. Check out the BBC website comments sections on any issues to do with Scotland or Scottish sport and you’ll see what I mean.

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I condemn all anonymous trolling, all of it, no matter who’s doing it. It’s disgusting, inhuman, cowardly and vile, and if I ever get my hands on the swines who threatened Joanna Cherry MP with death, they’ll be exposed for the obnoxious invertebrate cretins they are and then go to jail – the correct way to deal with such people, though the temptation to banjo them is always there.

So when I woke up the other day with a real idea in my head that wasn’t the result of a hangover, I thought the whole world would instantly agree with me and we could instigate a sea change – in football at least.

It’s simple – let’s ban anonymity in football. Not just online, but everywhere in every facet of football.

No-one would be allowed to go online without revealing their real identity. No-one could sign up to any football website without putting their own name up front.

I wanted to go further. Let every football fan attending every football match in Scotland wear a badge on which their own name and the name of the club they support is emblazoned in letters big enough to stand out on CCTV – that was the other brilliant bit of my idea, making CCTV compulsory for every club, siting all-seeing cameras and microphones in every stand and every street surrounding every stadium. It would be an unfortunate consequence that neutral supporters would not be allowed in, but hey, we all know there’s no neutrals out there any more, don’t we?

On Sunday we will have the last Old Firm match of the season. If we adopt my ban on anonymity we will know in future just who is responsible for, let’s say, criminal sectarian chanting.

What do you mean we can already know that? Surely you don’t mean that clubs know who occupies which seat and that police cameras can identify miscreants committing criminal offences? And you can’t seriously be suggesting that the police could track down all online trolls if they wanted to, as the law compels internet service providers to do? If that is so, why haven’t tens of thousands of “fans” not been arrested over the years?

The truth is that the authorities – the Scottish Government, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, Police Scotland, the SFA, the SPFL, the clubs themselves and, yes, the supporters groups – are all scared to tackle football’s problems, much of it to do with the anonymity of being in a crowd and thinking you can sing or chuck missiles with impunity.

The truth is nobody in authority really wants to tackle football’s criminals, because it would be too much trouble and cost too much.