The Champions League quarter-finals draw has just been made and Alex McLeish, while removing his boots after coming off the training ground, is attentive and optimistic. The strength of the Premier League will be underlined, he speculates, when three of its four representatives advance to the semi-finals. “We were close to reaching the last eight at Rangers [in 2006],” he recalls. “Two-each against Villarreal at Ibrox, one-each in Spain, so we went out on the away-goals rule. But getting to the last 16 and coming so close to doing what no other Scottish club has done was an achievement in itself. Of course, the Premier League clubs will be trying to win it.”

In essence this is why Big Eck came to succeed Steve Bruce as Birmingham manager last November. In Scotland, he undertook two of the three biggest jobs available to a football coach. The former Rangers and national team manager was successful to a degree. With Rangers, he won the Scottish Cup and League Cup in his first season, 2001-02, and the Treble - including the Scottish Premier League (SPL) - in his second. Financial constraints forced him to sell Barry Ferguson, Lorenzo Amoruso and Claudio Caniggia and his net profit in the transfer market during a five-year tenure amounted to £14m after his predecessor, Dick Advocaat, had run up a £48m deficit. Still he managed to regain the title from Martin O’Neill’s Celtic in 2005 before departing Ibrox a year later and succeeding Walter Smith as Scotland boss. Only a win by Italy in November at Hampden Park in the final qualifying game prevented McLeish from leading his country to the Euro 2008 finals.

These experiences - allied to the accomplished career he enjoyed as a player, winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1983 with Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen, along with three SPL titles, five Scottish Cups and two League Cups while being capped 77 times by Scotland - have prepared him well for the challenge he is facing now. Birmingham’s battle is for survival, not silverware, but the imperatives are much the same. The Blues play Newcastle, Reading, Manchester City and Wigan in their next four games and they need to win. Everton, Aston Villa and Liverpool will be their opposition in the following three games before the campaign comes to an end against Fulham and Blackburn. Combative by nature - “The importance of winning has always been there; when you’re fighting with your sister over a game of snakes and ladders at the age of three, you know that you want to win” - McLeish is ready for the fight.

“It’s difficult to compare jobs, chasing titles at Rangers and chasing Sunderland, Newcastle and other teams just above us in the Premier League, but I do know that I feel very equipped to do this job,” he says. “I started my managerial career in 1994 and even at Hibs [where he was manager between 1998 and 2001] I saw my future being in England, somewhere in the lower divisions, and I’d have to work my way up and prove myself. When Rangers came for me, I was surprised. I also knew that if they had been on a more sound financial footing, as they were two or three years before that, they’d have gone for a bigger name. So I was going there during a time of turmoil, but it was one of those irresistible challenges. I thought, ‘Right, I could be going in here and I could be the only Rangers manager in recent times not to win a trophy’. That was my first thought, but I knew I’d always be able to say that I managed Rangers.

McLeish was with Sir Alex Ferguson after Manchester United’s FA Cup quarter-final loss to Portsmouth last weekend. “There’s a guy who hardly ever loses a game, but, boy, was he gutted. You could see it in his body language, in his demeanour, and you know that he’s a guy who will be passionate until the very last kick that he’s got. It doesn’t matter if it’s Aberdeen, Manchester United, Rangers or Birmingham, defeat hurts just the same and it’s all about dealing with the setbacks.”

McLeish is satisfied that Birmingham have not punched below their weight during his four months in charge. “But maybe we’ve not punched too high above our weight either,” he acknowledges. Victories home and away over Tottenham, two drawn games against Arsenal and a 3-0 victory against Middlesbrough confirm the team’s commitment under McLeish, yet they have also suffered a 3-0 defeat by Bolton and a 2-0 reverse at Sunderland, while Portsmouth’s 4-2 win at Fratton Park on Wednesday kept the Blues hovering a point above the relegation zone. Kevin Keegan’s freefalling Newcastle could drop into the bottom three if Birmingham win at home tomorrow, and the order from McLeish will be to eliminate the mistakes that are undermining their bid for mid-table security.

“The goals that we conceded at Portsmouth were typical of the way we can be and this is where our younger players will learn,” he suggests. “When Rio Ferdinand was younger, he made some mistakes at West Ham, but he learnt from them. That’s what I need our boys to do. We’ve conceded a lot of soft goals and at other times teams have found us very difficult to beat. Our organisation has been tremendous in open play. We had a wee aberration the other night at Portsmouth, as we made one or two individual mistakes, but the boys are learning. Keegan is a perfect example of a player who improved and reached the top by virtue of his tremendous attitude and application. I never played against him, but I remember him putting the hammer on Scotland [in a 3-1 England victory] when I went to Wembley with the Tartan Army in 1979. He put us to the sword. Now he’s desperate to beat me and I’m desperate to beat him, but if we win this game, we’ll go above Newcastle and that’s our objective.”

Dougray Scott, the Scottish actor and Hibs fan who starred opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 2, has invited him to premieres and on to movie sets, and acting techniques fascinate McLeish. He reads movie magazine Empire as avidly as he peruses the pages of World Soccer but his passion for the cinema is unlikely to be indulged over coming weeks in the face of more pressing objectives. “The game is all consuming, whether you’re the manager of Birmingham or Rangers,” he says. “When Gordon Strachan came into Celtic [as manager, while McLeish managed Rangers] he said in the first week that we’d have to go out. The next time I saw him was after an Old Firm game and he said: ‘I can see why you were so reticent now. It’s just impossible, isn’t it?’ It’s very difficult when you’re rival managers of the Old Firm to go and have a beer together.

“Funnily enough, I met up with [Aston Villa manager] Martin O’Neill recently in London and we travelled back to Birmingham together. He told some stories from the old days with Brian Clough and we had good banter on that train journey, but football rivalries can get in the way.”

Especially when keeping your team on the right track is no easy task.