Alan Brazil: All Gordon Strachan needs now is a Gareth Bale

YOU’RE never too old to learn something new in football.

Gordon Strachan has been in the game for over 40 years, but he will have gained a huge amount from his first full campaign as Scotland manager.

Sadly, we were the only home nation that failed to qualify for Euro 2016 and that’s a massive disappointment.

However, I still feel that Gordon has restored a lot of pride in the national team.

There now seems to be a coherent way forward and I’m delighted he’ll be staying on as manager.

I’d have been gutted if the SFA had decided to look for someone else and throw away the experience Gordon has added during the last two years.

He has a talented backroom team in Mark McGhee and Stuart McCall they would also have been a big loss.

You can look at bald statistics but they don’t always show the full picture.

Scotland are now a team that nobody takes lightly.

It would be madness to throw away the progress that’s been made and the challenge is now to build on that.

Ultimately, Scotland’s failure to reach France came down to one stinker of a performance in Georgia.

Group D was always going to be incredibly tight.

Even so, it’s incredibly frustrating to see Martin O’Neill’s Irish side in the play-offs although I wish them all the best when Scotland took four points against them.

Hopefully, Scotland can continue to progress and make a leap forward in a similar way to Wales.

The Welsh have a tight, committed group of players that really want to play for their manager.

I see a very similar situation with Scotland, but there is a crucial difference.

The Scots don’t have two players with the quality of Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey.

As much as I would like to think that someone can really flourish and emerge as a class act for the next World Cup qualifying campaign, I can’t really see that happening.

England have emerging talents like Harry Kane, Ross Barkley and John Stones.

I don’t see anyone of a comparable quality on the fringes of the Scotland squad.

The question of why we seem incapable of producing at least one world-class player has been debated incessantly and nobody seems to come up with an answer.

Until there’s a breakthrough in that area, Gordon Strachan just has to make the best of what he has.

Great solidity in defence would certainly help, and I’m sure that’s something he will be looking at.

We can’t expect a miracle.

Slow, steady progress will have to do unless someone finds a Gareth Bale who was born north of the border.

We live in hope.