He may not know where he is going, but he knows where he has come from. After he had been interviewed for the Scotland job towards the end of last year, Gordon Strachan returned to Muirhouse, the deprived Edinburgh housing estate where he grew up. He had tea with his parents, who still live in the area, and later joined a few old mates in the bar at Silverknowes Golf Club, the municipal course from which the local kids still steal flagsticks, and ride their bikes through the bunkers.

Strachan remembers playing there, a young scamp swiping his way round the back nine, before returning to the streets where he dribbled until dark, dreaming

he was Peter Marinello, Pat Stanton or Colin Stein. As it was, he missed out on managing his country, and isn’t sure what will appear next on his cv, but it doesn’t matter because football has been good to him. In those days, when his only other job was to deliver milk around the neighbourhood, it gave him his chance.

“Everybody in this world has at least one talent, but the hard bit is making sure they are given the opportunity to show it,” says Strachan, who lives in Southampton, but knows the flight north like the back of his hand. His best friends in the game, the people to whom he is most grateful, are the ones who go way back: from George Mackie and Alex Caldwell, teammates at his first club, Dundee, to Mark McGhee and Alex McLeish, with whom he played at Aberdeen.

He has moved on since then, but not so much that he is inclined to forget. At New Year, when he went to watch Hibs, the club he supported as a boy, it wasn’t their young striker, Garry O’Connor, he was thinking of, but their legend of more than 30 years ago, Jimmy O’Rourke. “I’m not so much a fan of the team as a fan of the memories,” he says. “I think we all are. You associate it with a part of your life, and I’ll always be indebted to them for that.”

Strachan, of course, doesn’t always

live in the past. The tenacious little red head with the socks around his ankles didn’t win the Cup Winners’ Cup at Aberdeen, the league title at Leeds United and 50 Scotland caps without a determination to go far in the game. And in two spells as a manager, of Coventry City and Southampton, he was consumed by results, a prickly bundle of emotion wrapped up in the search for success. It is said that, in an effort to forget a defeat the day before, he once told his wife, Lesley, he was going for a walk, only to end up 17 miles away in a world of his own.

Perspective, though, has always returned. The man who has only half vision in his right eye, thanks to a playground accident with a pen, has never lost sight of the things that matter. Strachan has given everything to be where he is now, but if his recent exile from football is any indication, it is not an obsession that shapes his life. “Obsessive people scare me because they usually want to go as far as they can as fast as they can, and they don’t care if they knock people aside on the way. They forget the people who have helped them. They scare me when they’re trying to get there, and they scare me when they have failed, which is when they can be very depressing people. They return to those they have bumped aside and say, ‘I’m back’. I just think, ‘Sod you’.”

HAD Strachan been obsessed with success, he would not have quit Southampton this time last year, after leading them to an FA Cup final, eighth place in the Premiership and a taste of Europe for the first time in 19 seasons. He would not have decided that, with his managerial reputation at its peak, it was time to take a break from professional football, devote more attention to his family and do some of the things that he and Lesley had been promising themselves for years.

In a globe-trotting itinerary that took in mainland Europe, Australia and the United States, he has done everything from sand-surfing to snorkelling, strawberry-picking and fishing. He is embarrassed to admit that he went to see Puppetry of the Penis at the Edinburgh Festival. A lifelong love of animals lured him to the zoo of every town he visited, but when he came face to face with a snake outside his motel room one night, he was glad that it slithered off. “I was close enough to the ground to make faces at it,” says Strachan.

He dismisses the cynics who were suspicious of his sabbatical, and indeed the cod psychologists who have read too much into it. “I hadn’t fallen out of love with the game, or anything like that. Even when we were away, I watched football at every opportunity. Lesley and I were out cycling in Palm Beach one day, and we pulled in to watch a game between two Hispanic sides. I think they thought we were a bit odd. We ride a tandem, you see, like Dumb & Dumber. I’m at the front getting all the flies and crap in my face, and she’s at the back. I have to turn round to see if she’s actually pedalling and, every time I do that, the wee legs start to go.”

He wanted a change, that’s all. For Strachan, the last 12 months have been an education, be it from the various training sessions to which he was invited across Europe, or his eye-opening experience of Aussie Rules, which takes fitness to another level. Increasingly respected for his tactical punditry in the media, he has learned more about football from his new vantage point. “Now I look at the whole game, not just pieces of it. Instead of trying to find a weakness in the opposition, or scouting an individual, I am looking at the game from both sides.”

The hip operation he expected to undergo has been averted by physiotherapy, which means he can still play football, but the year out has been for the family as well as himself. Now 48, Strachan has two grandchildren, aged four and seven months, as well as two sons and a daughter. Gavin plays for Hartlepool United, Craig is an assistant golf professional and Gemma is auditioning to be an actress. All have benefited from his first season out of football since 1974.

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