Gordon Strachan keen to stop talking and start playing

“I have problems of ma own,”

said Gordon Strachan, deftly deflecting a question about the turbulent night in the Irish camp by describing a marathon Scrabble session with his sidekick Mark McGhee.

In the Irish team hotel words were scattered after a fashion but in the Scotland camp all is calm. They are sequestered in Mar Hall, a salubrious pile which once housed the 11th Lord Blantyre but which is now a secluded bolthole for golf enthusiasts and for a Scottish team in the midst of a renaissance.

Strachan, a cult hero whose playing days coincided with the last great rush of Scottish football optimism, is the chief architect of this upswing.

He has been trying to take it easy over the last few days. He decided to rest his players on Wednesday and go to the cinema with McGee. On the way they met Scottish fans pumped up about the Ireland game.

“That is when the excitement started. To be fair, we as coaches set the standard and I try to detach myself from the madness – which is a great madness for everyone else; for players it is good to have excitement. But I am totally detached . . . from the media side of it, I can get on with it and treat them the same.”

Every angle

They went to see new space film

Interstellar

. “So I was there for about three hours,” Strachan said. “With McGhee. He was explaining the theory of relativity and sound and aging and all the rest of it. He was buzzing by the time we got back to the hotel. No, it is exciting just now. As I say to the players, you can always worry about things afterwards. Don’t worry about disaster until it happens.”

As Strachan made clear during interviews, he is talked out. The booing, the extravagant praise of Robbie Keane and Aiden McGeady, the Scotland-Ireland dynamic: he has discussed every angle.

Now it is time to play football. He will withhold his team until this evening and admitted that he was enjoying tinkering with the home-away team variations and with Scotland’s success along the wings.

“I don’t know if you would call them attacking wide men. They float about. We thought about that going to Poland . . . do we have three central midfielders rather than two and one who is an out-and-out kind of striker who can come back and give us a hand? We might do the same again. We will have to wait for tomorrow. It is different.”

More rounded

Strachan heard Graeme Souness’s concerns that for all of Steven Fletcher’s qualities, the striker needs to emulate Keane’s knack for scoring international goals.

“I can see where Graeme is coming from but I watched Derby versus Wolves on Saturday. Five-nil. And the main goal-getter wasn’t Chris [Martin] . But he was involved in nearly everything. So the days of the out-and-out goal-getter might not be there. It is what you can do for the group. The more important people in goal-scoring are the three behind the main striker.

“Steven never scored in Poland but he made that lovely pass. I think years ago when you had an out-and-out striker, he couldn’t have turned and played a ball like he did. So you have to be more rounded now. It would be great if we had an out-and-out goal scorer like Messi or Ronaldo. But we don’t.”

The Scots won’t care who scores this evening as long as the goals come. This match will attract the biggest attendance at a home match in quarter of a century. Celtic Park may have a strong heritage but Strachan, who pushed for this match to be played at the venue, said nobody would be under any illusion as to whom the ground belongs.

“That’s Scottish territory and you’ll know it’s Scottish territory. There will be 55,000 Scots in there. You’ll be in no doubt where you are tomorrow.”