Bookmakers long ago developed a cure for one of the deadliest conditions that can afflict football supporters. Early onset euphoria, whose principal symptom is a compulsion to exaggerate the promise of a marvellous scoreline or two, can usually be brought swiftly under control by exposure to the betting lists concerned with a team’s future prospects. It is thus more easily countered than groundless optimism syndrome (GOS), that scourge of racegoers occasionally mentioned in this column.

Presumably the majority of Scotland fans have been so thoroughly inoculated against excessive hopefulness by past disappointments that they didn’t need anything else to help them keep a surreally glorious night in Paris in a down-to-earth context. But those who were in danger of building too many fantasies on the magnificent 1-0 victory that completed a home-and-away double over France for Alex McLeish’s men (and, coupled with their defeat of Lithuania at Hampden on the previous Saturday, lifted them to the top of their Euro 2008 qualifying group) found on Thursday morning that the bookies were ready to provide their familiar antidote to delirium.

Scotland can still be backed at 6-4 to reach the finals of the tournament and at 150-1 to emerge as continental champions. Far from insulting the Scots’ chances, these odds might be considered mean, especially that 150-1. What is undeniably intriguing, however, is the huge discrepancy between the positions of England and Scotland in the betting market. Even before they went out to meet Israel at Wembley on September 8, England weren’t available anywhere at odds more attractive than 11-8 on to qualify for involvement in Austria and Switzerland next summer, and they were only 10-1 to triumph in a competition that has hitherto yielded them nothing but frustration. Now that they have beaten both Israel and Russia 3-0, they are long odds-on to qualify and the patriots wishing to wager on them to be masters of Europe will discover the commonest price is 7-1.

That small blitz of figures is not delivered as a provocation to Gamblers Anonymous but as a further indication of how stubbornly expectations continue to cling to the England football team in the face of repeated failures in the big arenas. Of course, the bookies’ maths represent a rather complex barometer of those expectations. Their calculations seek to blend and balance their own experts’ cool-headed evaluation of playing strengths and relevant form with what experience tells them is liable to be the public enthusiasm for whatever odds they offer. Obviously, they are not striving after some classically detached objectivity but trying to operate the principles of supply and demand in a way that will maximise the likelihood of a profit for their business.

A price that was a brilliantly accurate assessment of probabilities wouldn’t be of much use if it didn’t draw in customers, and it would be still less desirable for the odds-layers if it brought a volume of bets that threatened them with hefty losses. They will always trade at the lowest rates the market will stand. When William Hill and Ladbrokes tell us that anybody who fancies England to be next year’s European champions can be on with them at 7-1, we have to assume they feel many of their clients will be prepared to take such relatively cramped odds. And that is an interesting statement about the persistence of faith in England’s capacity to rise above a truly abysmal record of underachievement among the heavy hitters of the game.

It is perhaps scarcely surprising that their chance of going all the way in the current championship is reckoned, on the basis of the betting, to be more than 20 times better than that of Scotland. The Scots are inured to the reality that for them highs in international football must be of a kind unconnected with challenging seriously for trophies. Glory comes rarely, in fleeting, if unforgettable spasms, and consistent potency is an aspiration too outlandish to be given houseroom. Wednesday night at the Parc des Princes was an archetypal zenith, not least because it owed so much to a goal touched by magic. James McFadden’s stunning shot from distance may yet mean more than victory in a single match (though, sadly, dread of a brutal near-miss dominates my sense of how a stirringly brave bid for qualification will end) but even if Scotland go on to reach the finals they will be resigned to inhabiting the status of remote outsiders.

So maybe, in spite of the uncertainties that remain littered across England’s route to Austria and Switzerland – conspicuously the possibility that Russia in Moscow on October 17 will present something vastly different from the mixture of ludicrously inept defending and physically lightweight attacking they displayed at Wembley last week – a case can be made for the gulf separating the squads of McClaren and McLeish in the betting. But isn’t it a little flattering to have England within two points of the 5-1 favourites for the tournament, Germany, who have dropped just two points and scored 31 goals in Group D. Not only are the Germans multiple winners of both the European championship and the World Cup (with a back-up catalogue of appearances as losing finalists) but they are, on television evidence of how they perform when at full strength, impressive enough these days to suggest they may be entering another era of distinction.

Plainly, any explanation of England’s odds for Euro 2008 has to rely on the recurring, resilient belief that the latest crop of the country’s footballers will refuse to be the serial underachievers successive generations of their predecessors have been. I can testify to how contagious that readiness to defy history can be, having had a minor plunge at 10-1 in the 2006 World Cup. Though there has undoubtedly been a gathering of encouraging omens since last weekend, it won’t be a strain for me to stay away from the 7-1.

When hypocrisy punctured morals

It is hard for an outsider to find a mooring of unchallengeable truth in all the heavy currents of rumour, innuendo and allegation that have been sweeping through the murky waters of Formula One since that extraordinary sentence was passed on the McLaren team in Paris on Thursday. But one judgement is inescapable: there is a sickening hypocrisy at the core of the decision of motor racing’s ruling body, the FIA, to punish McLaren as an organisation with a fine of $100m and the invalidation of points gained by their cars in this season’s constructors’ championship while at the same time decreeing that the men competing in those cars, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, should be left untouched and free to continue their dramatic battle for the drivers’ world championship.

If the FIA considered the secretive acquisition of confidential technical information relating to the race cars of Ferrari by key figures at McLaren so prejudicial to Ferrari’s interests, such a heinous violation of fundamental regulations, that the English team’s participation in the constructors’ championship of 2007 had to be obliterated, didn’t that mean McLaren’s cars, indeed their whole operation, had to be regarded as tainted by the industrial espionage? So how can it make sense, or represent justice, to rule that Alonso and Hamilton should keep all the drivers’ points they have amassed? Isn’t that a bit like disqualifying a horse but saying the jockey won the race?

Hamilton, whose arrival as the most prodigiously talented rookie F1 has ever seen has been one of the global sports stories of the year, would obviously have merited huge sympathy had he been included as a guiltless victim in the FIA’s punishment. But that, sadly, is what should have happened as a natural corollary of the Paris findings. The FIA’s division of culpability is exposed in all its shameful expediency (as a purely commercial decision) by evidence establishing that Alonso and his team’s test driver, Pedro de la Rosa, discussed Ferrari trade secrets in an exchange of e-mails. So Alonso was directly implicated in the wrongdoing.

His involvement was clearly not nearly as deep as that of Nigel Stepney, the former Ferrari mechanic, and Mike Coughlan, the suspended chief designer at McLaren (it was the passing of a 780-page dossier by Stepney to Coughlan that was central to the scandal) but it was more than sufficient to make the free pass handed to the McLaren drivers not so much an illogicality as an immorality.

Alonso, already twice a world champion with Renault, is emerging as one of several unsavoury players in the shadowy drama. It has become public knowledge that his fall-out with Ron Dennis, team principal at McLaren, contributed massively to the sequence of events that led inexorably to Thursday’s unprecedented sentence. Angered by what he perceived to be his team’s inexcusable refusal to treat him as their No 1 driver, the Spaniard apparently threatened to reveal the great deal he knew about the information emanating from Stepney (and the proof of the traffic contained in his computer). Dennis insists that until that crude pressure was applied to him he had no idea of the full extent of the dark dealings surrounding Coughlan’s association with Stepney. Many who don’t find Dennis’s personality endearing commend him as man of integrity and believe him when he says that when his eyes were opened by the whistle-blowing threat his first reaction was to telephone the president of the FIA, Max Mosley: “I want to stress that once I became aware that new evidence might exist, which I did on the morning of the Hungarian Grand Prix, I immediately phoned the FIA to keep them informed.”

It is well known that the ringmaster of Formula One, Bernie Ecclestone, and Mosley, who form an alliance as powerful as any in world sport, do not harbour the warmest feelings for the McLaren boss. That call was never likely to have happy consequences for Ron Dennis.