Gordon Strachan, the Scotland manager, yesterday named his 26-man squad for the vital Euro 2016 qualifying matches away to Georgia and at home to Germany, and dismissed concerns that key players are not receiving enough game time with their clubs.
Steven Naismith, the Everton forward, has not started a match this season while Alan Hutton, the Aston Villa right-back, has once again found himself sidelined at the Midlands club.
Yet Strachan will not require state-of-the art medical equipment to monitor their readiness to take part in these ties, the outcome of which will go a long way towards determining whether the national team can end an 18-year exile from leading tournaments.
While prepared to accommodate the technical developments, which he believes can help him and his players, the 58-year-old remains sceptical of much of what he clearly regards as fads.
“You tend to have a look at them in training and, usually, you sniff it from there, watching the body language and other things,” he said. “I know it isn’t heart monitors and I know I don’t have a sports scientist or a sports psychologist to work this out. Basically, I look at them and ask myself: ‘Are these guys ready? Are they up for it? Can their body take it? Have they had enough games?’
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“It’s really just watching players. There are scientific scenarios for everything in football: I even see players wearing heart monitors during matches. You can see them when they’re taken off after 60 minutes and it makes no difference whatsoever. But it looks good. It looks fantastic and it impresses chairmen and people who don’t know anything about it. I’m kind of old-fashioned: I just use my eyes. We develop with sports science and there’s plenty of the new stuff that we can use but there’s plenty of the old stuff that we can use as well.
“If you can merge both of them then life would be great but some people are convinced that everything has to be new and you need to have a degree in whatever it is to work out whether or not a player is tired.
“You can actually do that at 23 now, which I find very interesting. It takes you about 20 years to become an elite coach but just 18 months to become an elite sports psychologist or scientist.”
While Strachan had his differences with Sir Alex Ferguson while he was a player at Manchester United, he has always considered his former manager to be the greatest sports psychologist of all time and he prefers tried and tested old-school methods.
When Hutton was frozen out at Villa Park by the previous manager, Paul Lambert, Strachan continued to select him for Scotland and he will continue to start with the 30-year-old, regardless of his status at club level.
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“Hutton never let us down: in fact, he was one of our best players during that period, which was an eye-opener because most international managers would say: ‘If you’re not playing regularly then you’re not getting a game’,” he said. “We didn’t do that although, to be fair, we didn’t have the luxury of having two or three other players for that position. But then we watched him turning in fantastic performances for us so we can never take that approach.
“You can also see players who have played loads of games for their clubs and who are maybe just a bit tired or going through a difficult period in their career. But the likes of Alan and Steven Naismith have earned the right to be included. I like to think I’m quite loyal that way. Of course, the players also know, if I see someone else who’s been outstanding, that I would make that change but the way they play, train and go about things counts.
“We wanted a club-type atmosphere and I think we’ve got that now. If you guys had picked a Scotland squad last night you’d probably have chosen 22 or 23 of the names that are in it. There were probably 15 names we had to narrow it down from for the last three or four places.
“When you’re a football person, someone who’s played it and who loves the game the way that Steven Naismith does, you can see that he just wants to play. Roberto Martínez has a fantastic squad and it’s hard to get a game there.”
One player who may feature, and make his international debut, in Tbilisi a week on Friday is Stuart Armstrong, the Celtic midfielder. “It has taken him a little longer to get back into the squad because it is really competitive in that area,” Strachan said. “He brings his own style, but I don’t want to give too much away because it’s up the Georgians to find out what he does, not for me to tell them.”