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If God gives you lemons, make lemonade: so reads the mantra of the eternal optimist. Steve McClaren would once have fallen into that category until life left him to suck a lemon instead as England stumbled out of the European Championship at the qualifying stage last year. Subsequently ridiculed, reviled and unemployable in England, he has travelled to the outposts of the eastern Netherlands to coach FC Twente, a small-time success story dipping their toes into the Champions League for the first time. Having appointed McClaren, they duly drew Arsenal in the third qualifying round.

Had all gone according to plan, McClaren would this week have been juggling with a squad to play the Czech Republic, rather than pondering a way of stopping Emmanuel Adebayor and Robin van Persie with a team of underdogs at the Gelredome in Arnhem, where Twente play their home games while their stadium, De Grolsch Veste, is being reconstructed.

He could probably have done without Barclays Premier League opposition in what will be a defining match this season, because it means a harsh spotlight will shine on his new career, when he would have benefited from being allowed to keep his head down and get on with the job. His new position does not come with the external pressures of being the national team head coach, particularly because Twente are not even big news in the Netherlands. “It is intense because of the work, but not intense in the way the England job was,” McClaren said. “We had a player picked for the Dutch Olympic squad and it was a few days before anyone even found out about it over here. Can you imagine news like that staying quiet in England? It means I can focus on working with the players, without distractions.”

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Drawing Arsenal changed that. There will be greater attention from England now and the match will be shown live back home. If Twente lose, as expected, even against a weakened Arsenal team, McClaren knows he will be judged once more. He cannot fight this and decided from the start that his mission was not to prove his critics wrong, but to rebuild his reputation to his satisfaction. A lot of managers with better teams than Twente find it tough against Arsenal.

“The difficulty is not that it is an English club, but which English club it is,” he explained. “On their day, Arsenal are the best football team in the Premier League, if not Europe. And I wanted to avoid them for that reason, not because I was concerned with scrutiny back home.

“The first thing I must do is be successful here, but not to prove people wrong in England. I want to learn and experience new things, which I am doing. This is not the end of my career, it is the middle and it is good to do something new. I have always wanted to coach abroad and to come to Holland, which is a country with a coaching culture and a player development culture.

“Holland has a hundred coaches working all over Europe and with national teams. How many has England got? A handful. Some of the work you see Dutch coaches do with young players is astounding, just phenomenal. It is all technique-based, which is why they have this conveyor belt of good young players. However long I am here, I will be a better coach for it.”

Even with a makeshift midfield, few are expecting Arsenal to have it too hard this evening and McClaren is certainly not relying on this 90 minutes to restore his reputation. He has not shed his old skin completely, though. “The key word,” he said, “is belief. A lot of times underdogs underperform because they do not believe they can do it. I’d like a good performance, to be in the second leg and still have a chance. The best team doesn’t always win. I know that more than anyone.” And he flashes that smile. You know the one.