YISSSSS, double-yisssss as Mooey, the friend of TV’s Scully, used to exhort whenever something “dead good” or “sound as a pound” happened to him in his native Liverpool.

The reason for my exaltation is that my wife and I have got tickets for next year’s Olympic Games. Unfortunately, we have not got the athletics or track cycling tickets that we also applied for under the circuitous first route to buy a part of the greatest sports show on earth.

But come next autumn we will be attending one of the quarter-finals of the Olympics 2012 football competition.

Missing out on the athletics – we sought tickets for the first morning of the track and field competitions and the opening rounds of the indoor cycling – means our Olympic experience will not occur in London. So, no visit then to either the new Olympic stadium or the nearby saddle-shaped velodrome.

Instead we will be some 80 miles north of York at Newcastle United’s St James’ Park ground. But the excitement of being part of the Olympic experience is already palpable and will surely increase as the appointed showdown nears.

Until the competition kicks off we’ll not know which teams will be in action at the Geordie nation’s sporting Elysian fields, but previous football competitions have featured many star players such as Argentine’s Javier Mascherano and Brazil’s Lucas Leiva, presently with Barcelona and Liverpool respectively.

It is a quarter-final from which the winners will know they will have a 75 per cent chance of capturing an Olympic medal, so the encounter should be brimming with passion and purpose.

There might even be the Great Britain team on view, though this week the question arose whether there would indeed be a truly representative GB line-up in 13 months’ time.

Jumping the gun with what seemed undue haste, the British Olympic Association announced it had reached an historic agreement with the English Football Association that there would be a team playing under GB colours in the quest for 2012 Olympic gold.

However, it seems that several key players had not been informed. None of the respective FA’s of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, who have all opposed the idea of such an inclusive team, were party to any such unprecedented agreement.

Stewart Regan, the chief executive of the Scottish FA, was adamant that no such sanction was in place, nor likely to be.

Said the man, whose previous role was chief executive at Yorkshire County Cricket Club: “Our position remains – we are opposed to taking part in Team GB.

“We signed a letter to FIFA in 2009 which gave the FA the right to represent the Home Nations as Team GB. We need to protect our identity and have no interest in taking part.”

Obviously there’s a problem here and rightly so.

While everyone would like to indulge in all things Olympic five rings being bathed in sweetness and light and the home nations represented by an all-embracing GB team, it’s unlikely to be that way in football given that the respective four nations are governed by their own separate FA authorities.

If the English FA have been given the power to organise the team, then they can hardly expect to lord it over their three other counterparts.

Why should Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland cede their autonomy? They are individual organisations in their own right and fears that a GB team could set a precedent and jeopardise their independence are genuine.

If they were to bow to the GB principle then other football-playing nations under the umbrella of either UEFA or FIFA could – with some legitimacy – claim these islands have only one overall governing authority, which would fissure and fracture the governance of football throughout Britain.

For one I don’t think FIFA and their under-fire leader Sepp Blatter would be averse to applying such logic especially given how our national media have rightly exposed some of the world governing body’s murky machinations over bribery and corruption.

Led by Blatter, FIFA resemble a massive, snarling bear nursing not just a sore head, but a grumbling appendix, a pus-infected paw and an agonising toothache.

Even without the say-so of their respective FA’s, individual players from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland could be targeted for sanction should they play.

A football Team GB will be one in name only with the players drawn from England and that’s logical. Let the Games begin.