Scotland today showed us the future if Celtic is willing to embrace it.

A 0-0 draw does not exactly feel like the start of a new regime, but that was actually a more entertaining Scotland team than I have watched in quite a while. What was interesting was the style of football being played. It was much more attractive to watch than what Steve Clarke had been producing in the latter part of his tenure.

What I found especially interesting is that Clarke was lauded by sections of the media for reasons which often passed understanding.

Yet Sébastien Pocognoli already looks as though he has more in his locker. This was his first match in charge, so obviously nobody should get carried away, but there were already signs of a different way of thinking. Scotland’s 0-0 draw in Slovenia was Pocognoli’s first game since replacing Clarke.

So, I like what I see from this new-look Scotland, even if some of the team selection is rather bizarre.

Oli McBurnie back in a Scotland shirt? I do not think that is an experiment which is going to last particularly long. He has never looked like a Scotland player to me; I barely regard him as a football player at all. But the Scottish media has always seemed to like him, and the Ibrox connection certainly does not hurt in that regard.

But what I really found myself thinking about during the game was the number of these players who no longer play in Scotland, and what their development should tell Celtic about our own future.

Aaron Hickey should have been a Celtic player.

I do not think there are many people who would disagree with that. The offer should have been made when he was at Hearts, and had Celtic got that deal done he could have been our first-choice full-back for years.

John McGinn should have signed for Celtic too.

That was barely even up for debate at the time.

Lewis Ferguson probably would not have walked straight into our midfield when he first emerged, but he would be running it now. He is arguably an even bigger miss for the Ibrox club than he is for us, given the obvious connections there.

And, of course, we know all about Ben Doak. He had the opportunity to stay at Celtic, and there was a pathway laid out for him, but he preferred the offer from England.

Then there is Billy Gilmour. He was never coming to us, of course, not whilst his mother is alive. I have been a critic but I thought this was his best game in a Scotland shirt in a long, long time. It might even be the best performance I have seen from him for the national team. For perhaps the first time watching him, I properly understood what some of the hype surrounding him for years has actually been about.

Sometimes it takes the right environment and the right coach to bring those qualities to the surface. And that is the thing which struck me most watching this Scotland side: so many of these players have become exceptional footballers for their clubs after leaving this country.

Why are continental clubs willing to take chances on the Jack Hendry’s and the Stephen Welsh’s whom we reject? Why do they identify players like Lewis Ferguson and Aaron Hickey and see qualities which clubs here either undervalue or fail to develop properly?

Kieran Bowie was another one who caught my eye when he came on. He missed an absolute sitter, of course, and I am sure he will be sitting with his head in his hands thinking about it. But he looked intelligent on the ball. He found space, created space for himself and looked comfortable operating at that level.

I always thought Bowie was a talented kid. I would never have wanted Celtic to sign him as an immediate first-choice striker, but there was obvious raw ability there.

And that is actually the point.

No Celtic supporter was desperate for Stephen Welsh to stay. Nobody was mourning Jack Hendry when he left. Plenty of Celtic fans would have taken Bowie, and almost every one of us would have taken Hickey.

But we would not necessarily have been signing the footballers we watched today. We would have been signing earlier versions of them.

Paler versions. Rawer versions. Because so many of these players improved dramatically after leaving Scotland. They became much better footballers after getting away from our coaching culture.

Stephen Welsh has talked about that himself recently, and for all the sneering which sometimes goes on about continental football, coaches elsewhere simply approach the game differently from the way we do here.

Every football culture has its own ideas. Every association has its own methodology. Every country develops players in a slightly different way.

And I will say this without hesitation: an awful lot of them are better at it than we are. This is why I constantly go on about Celtic eventually having to break the mould.

We remain far too fixated on the idea of bringing in Irish coaches, British coaches or people who “know the club.” That phrase has become almost a qualification in itself at Celtic, and it is nonsensical.

Knowing Celtic does not automatically make someone a better coach. Knowing the building does not make you capable of improving the footballers inside it.

If we want to see players improve in the way Hickey, Ferguson, Gilmour and others have improved, then perhaps we need to start coaching them differently. Maybe we need people from outside the bubble, coaches who arrive with different ideas and who actually want to implement them.

That would help us domestically, but I believe it would help Celtic in Europe too.

Because it would make our players technically better. It would make them positionally better. It would improve their understanding of space, their decision-making and their intelligence within a game.

How many years of failure at continental level do we have to watch before accepting that other football cultures simply do some things better than we do?

They drill players differently. They emphasise different skills. They produce more technically sophisticated footballers. And over and over again we see the evidence.

Scottish clubs go abroad in competitive football and get turned over. Celtic, to our eternal despair, are hardly exempt from that.

People often explain the improvement in these Scottish players by saying, “Well, he plays in Italy now,” or, “Of course he has improved; he is playing against better opposition every week.” That is only half the answer.

The other half is that much of the football environment is simply better.

The coaching is better. The technical work is better.

Different skills are emphasised. Sports science, analytics and sports psychology are often treated more seriously. There is greater focus on the mental side of football and greater emphasis on technicality rather than physicality.

There is a level of sophistication which the Scottish game too often does not get near. That is one of the reasons our clubs struggle so badly when they step into Europe.

And money cannot explain all of it.

Plenty of the leagues producing better-coached footballers are not vastly richer than ours. Some clubs which embarrass Scottish teams in Europe operate on budgets which should not frighten Celtic at all.

So perhaps the real gap is not measured in bank accounts.

Perhaps it is measured in what those clubs do on the training pitch every day.

That is why teams across Europe keep coming here and taking our players. They see raw material which can be polished and improved.

And one of the first things those players learn when they leave Scotland is a different way of thinking about football.

Now Scotland has appointed a coach who comes from outside our traditional football culture, and even after one match you could see the possibility of something different. Pocognoli has been brought in after working in Belgian and continental football rather than emerging from the usual Scottish coaching conveyor belt. :chatgpt-content-reference{index=”1″}

I hope he does well, and I believe he can.

Because if the national side improves under him, Celtic should be paying very close attention. We might be looking at a version of our own possible future.

Not the same players, not the same system and certainly not the same circumstances, but the same basic principle: bring in somebody who looks at football differently and allow him to challenge assumptions which have gone unchallenged for too long.

You have to want that change, though.

You have to be prepared to break out of the box you have built around yourself.

And that, of course, is the worrying part with Celtic. Sometimes I think we like that box a little too much. But it is suffocating us.

It is suffocating much of Scottish football too.

We have seen clubs in this country bring in coaches from abroad and suddenly look completely different. The players have not all magically changed overnight. The budget has not exploded. What has changed is the thinking.

That should tell us something.

These coaches are not performing magic. They simply approach football in ways which are often miles ahead of how we still think about it here.

And until Celtic is prepared to accept that possibility, we will keep wondering why Scottish players leave this country and suddenly become much better footballers somewhere else.

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