MY ERSTWHILE Herald colleague David Belcher does a great line in self-deprecation – but once you get to know him, of course, he is another typically arrogant Mancunian. It is all a carefully rehearsed act, so it is was probably inevitable that it has been in drama that he has found extra-journalistic success.

Perhaps half of the above paragraph is true. Or half-true. Belcher is actually very quick to credit others for their part in anything he is involved in creating, and as for his theatrical successes, he won’t mind me pointing out that they have been a fair distance apart. Like a quarter of century.

In the last decade of the 20th century, he wrote a play called Partick Thistle Football Crazy which started life in the late-lamented Arches in Glasgow and eventually played on the stage of the Pavilion. I remember seeing it in what was possibly the ideal venue, Maryhill Community Central Halls, a venue once more often visited by touring theatre companies and little more than a muscular throw-in and a good boot up the park from the thrilling home of the Jags, Firhill.

It was a very funny, energetic and affectionate tribute to fans who, like himself, follow Glasgow’s third team, more in hope than expectation. In that reality, nothing much has changed in the past 25 years. The team’s uncertain progress in the current BetFred Cup games, and upcoming home tie against Celtic, is a case in point, as Herald diarist Ken Smith was noting only this week.

According to Belcher, he played little part in the success of the play. “I had no idea what I was doing, but my sprawling mess was reshaped and redeemed by the director Grant Smeaton and the cast.”

One of those was Frank Miller, and Belcher gives him a big chunk of the plaudits for his second taste of fame as a playwright with The Pieman Cometh. It debuted at Glasgow’s Oran Mor during the city’s Comedy Festival this spring and is now playing every afternoon at the Gilded Balloon’s Rose Street Theatre for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Subtitled “A Cautionary Football Tale”, The Pieman Cometh is based on the experiences of Bryan Jackson, an insolvency practitioner who has worked on the lamentable accounts of several football clubs, and who co-wrote the script. By Belcher’s account, Miller, who directs this one, gave the pair essential pointers on how to make it work, and cast members Julie Coombe, Callum Cuthbertson and Gavin Jon Wright are pretty much responsible for making it funny.

Be that as it may, Belcher would like to make clear that his muse has progressed beyond the limited appeal of an audience of football fanatics, not to mention the finite realms of Partick Thistle followers. What The Pieman Cometh examines is the self-delusion of normally sensible businessmen when it comes to the business of football clubs, where they unfailing neglect to apply the same rules that made them successful in business. It is one thing being devoted enough to believe in the likely success of the team you buy a season ticket to see, quite another to throw millions of pounds of good money after bad in the same daft belief.

It is an incontrovertible fact, little acknowledged by the world at large, that the world of sport has much to learn from the rigour and responsibility that the vast majority of arts company boards bring to their work, and Jackson had a serious purpose in writing the play in illustrating exactly how chaps like himself have a job to do sorting out football’s mess. Fortunately he hooked up with Belcher, who had a comedic purpose in making it a “wickedly funny” entertainment, as The Herald’s Mary Brennan put it back in March.

The Pieman Cometh: A Cautionary Football Tale is at the Gilded Balloon Rose Street at 2.30pm to August 26, excepting Monday August 13.