Strachan: Stuart McCall has done wonders at Motherwell

Gordon Strachan has praised Stuart McCall for his ‘remarkable’ achievement in leading Motherwell to runners-up spot in the Premiership.

The Steelmen’s run came too late to have an impact on the Manager of the Year voting, with Aberdeen’s Derek

McInnes picking up the awards given by both PFA Scotland and the Scottish Football Writers’ Association.

Nevertheless, the national manager says no-one should be in any doubt about the scale of his assistant’s feat with his club this season.

Strachan recalls: “When I saw all those players leaving last summer Michael Higdon, Darren Randolph, Nicky Law, Henrik Ojaama, Chris Humphrey and Tom Hateley I thought: ‘Whoops-a-daisy, Stuart is in trouble.

“We speak about it a lot, and if you take Celtic out of the equation, the rest of the teams up here have four really influential guys in their team, one way or another.

“It might be that they are great players, or men with a fantastic presence.

“If you lose two of them you will finish mid-table. If you lose three you will probably be down the bottom. And that goes for every team, not just Aberdeen and Dundee United.

“So you look at the players who left and you can see Stuart really had his work cut out for him this season. But he is a guy with a steely determination, who doesn’t let anything affect him.

“It doesn’t matter about any individual result. He just keeps coming out for the training, always smiling, full of enthusiasm for the game, and focussed on what he wants to achieve.”

As his success in winning the Clydesdale Bank Manager of the Year award in 2013 and the predatory offer from Sheffield United last summer attest, it is a winning formula.

“Stuart is just a proper person,” says Strachan, who recruited McCall for the Scotland backroom team.

“I know the ones who are in football for themselves. Some of them have to be in it for themselves to make a living for their families. Others are in it to boost their egos.

“Stuart, though, is in it to make his players round about him better. That applies to his work with Motherwell and it applies to his work with Scotland.

“His goal is to help them get near to what he achieved as a footballer. He is here to help everybody, and I am really, really pleased at the success he has achieved this season.”