Old Firm managers don’t spend too much time waxing lyrical about each other, but these solemn days of May seem very different.

Walter Smith yesterday paid his own handsome and authentic tribute to Tommy Burns, who died of cancer on Thursday at the age of 51.

Smith and Burns were once Old Firm foes in opposition dugouts in the mid-1990s, but the two then worked together with the Scotland national team: Smith as manager with Burns his assistant. As Smith confirmed yesterday, it was a time when the two men got to know each other better and very quickly got along famously.

“I felt very fortunate to have worked with Tommy,” Smith said. “Prior to working with him with Scotland, the truth is I didn’t really know him that well. But over the last few years I’d got to know him much better, and I find this a really sad time.

“Tommy was one of the best people I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. Football aside, he was also a terrific man, with a nice manner about him. The more I got to know Tommy the more I got to enjoy that side to him. He was very humorous, but also a very sincere man. He was a smashing guy, a really good guy to be around. And it’s especially sad that something like this should happen when he was not of an age when things like that should happen to you.”

Exuding a warm smile, Smith added his own humorous contribution of the tradition of the past 48 hours in Scottish football, wherein Burns’s colourful and sometimes quirky personality has been recalled and celebrated.

“From the outside I’d always imagined Tommy to be a very meticulous manager, but when I got to know him, I discovered he had this delightful harum-scarum side to him,” Smith said. “He would forget things, and leave things.

“He used to tell a great story about the time, when Tommy was with Berti Vogts and Scotland, when he accidentally left the sheets with all the set-play diagrams under his bed at Cameron House. At Hampden, wee Berti then asked him, ‘Have you got the set-plays?’ and Tommy said, ‘Aye,’ knowing full well he’d left them under his bed. Berti realised that Tommy wasn’t putting the sheets up in the dressing-room, while Tam was away phoning for taxis to get them brought over. It was an important game, and Berti was apparently going off his head, but that’s what Tommy was like. He had that delightful side to him.

“Tommy also had a habit of falling asleep. I remember the World Cup qualifier we played against Norway \, which was a very important game for Scotland, and I was in the dressing-room beforehand giving my state of the nation address to the players. There was Tommy, my assistant, in the front row asleep.

“I had to stop because I was laughing. Later I said to him, ‘Tommy, was my team-talk that good that you fell asleep?’ He said, ‘Aye.’ Tommy had that about him. He just had a nice way to him.”

Smith also recalled the time he and Burns went head-to-head during a ferociously fought 1995-96 season between the Old Firm. In the end Smith’s Rangers won the title by four points, though Burns’s Celtic lost just one league game all season; it was during the period when Rangers were striving to match Celtic’s nine-in-a-row record of titles.

“That was a difficult time for both of us,” Smith said. “We were trying to achieve nine-in-a-row, while Tommy and Celtic were trying to prevent it, and it was a tough time to be a manager. Celtic’s nine-in-a-row was a proud record, but I don’t think anyone could have handled that any better than Tommy did. His team did everything it could — you couldn’t have asked for any more of a manager in one season.

“Celtic lost just one league game that season, which was remarkable, but it still didn’t win them the championship. There was something going on then that none of us had much control over, but Tommy handled it all with a great dignity.

“I think he was unfortunate in his management at Celtic. He faced a Rangers side which was on a mission, if you like, to try to equal Celtic’s record. Tommy eventually got sacked, but in any other set of circumstances, he’d probably have gone on to be a very successful manager there.”

Concluding a moving tribute, Smith highlighted the way in which Rangers and their supporters had recognised “a true football man” in Burns. Many scarves of the Ibrox club have been tied outside Celtic Park in tribute to their late hero.

"The whole place here at Rangers is sad — most of our backroom staff have worked with Tommy, either with Scotland or, in Kenny McDowall’s case, at Celtic,” Smith said. “There are few who epitomise a club more than Tommy did Celtic. He was a Celtic man: a supporter as a kid all the way through to having a terrific career for them. For me, Tommy showed everything that was good about Celtic.

“I think there is a respect in Rangers supporters for someone whom they know to be a true Celtic man. Tommy was there man and boy and I think Rangers supporters respect that. And Tommy had a respect for Rangers too — a dignified one in the sense that he never criticised Rangers, but held the club in a great deal of respect. I think that has enabled Rangers supporters to show their respect for him.”