Salzburg’s most celebrated citizens could not wait to get out of town and flee to Switzerland. But unlike the Von Trapp family, who hiked over the Alps to avoid being captured by the Nazis in The Sound of Music, at least Billy Stark can take the train.

George Burley’s undercover agent is keeping the sort of low profile of which the Von Trapps would have approved. Stark is the spy whose mission is to learn the secrets of Holland’s remarkable renaissance at Euro 2008 and compile a dossier for the Scotland manager that will be valuable when the countries meet in the 2010 World Cup qualifying campaign.

Burley asked Stark, who is in charge of Scotland Under-21 and the youth squads, to spend this month watching Holland to gain as much knowledge as possible about the players whose demolition of Italy and France over the past week has captured the imagination of the whole of Europe.

Both of those teams beaten by Holland qualified for Euro 2008 at Scotland’s expense. A last-minute winner from Christian Panucci in that dramatic decider against Italy at Hampden Park last November allowed the world champions to progress and offered a lifeline to France, even though they had lost twice to Scotland in qualifying.

The Tartan Army’s dream of going to Austria and Switzerland may have evaporated, but Stark still managed to reach the promised land. Indeed, Salzburg seems like a little bit of Scotland. Stark and Jim Fleeting, the SFA’s director of football development, are based in the city, which is playing host to several dozen visiting coaches and Scottish Premier League managers who are taking their Uefa Pro-Licence. Its location allows Stark to criss-cross Austria and Switzerland to watch games and see training sessions.

“It is two hours from Klagenfurt, where I saw Germany play Croatia on Thursday night,” Stark said yesterday, as he caught his breath during his hectic itinerary. “Vienna is three hours away and Innsbruck is only a 90-minute journey. I flew from Munich up to Berne on Friday to see Holland again, when they played France, so I am really putting in a lot of mileage.”

Stark was committed to watching Euro 2008 as part of the Pro-Licence, but when Burley asked him to double his workload and spy on the Dutch, he embraced the task with relish. “It is still a long time until we face Holland and a lot could change by then but it’s still a worthwhile task,” Stark said.

“They are obviously going to be under a new coach because Bert van Marwijk is taking over from Van Basten [who moves to Ajax] after these finals, but the players will not really change and neither will the Dutch method. These are the best matches to see them in because they have to be as professional as possible, it’s not like watching them in friendlies.”

Stark came away from Holland’s taming of Italy extolling the virtues of one man in particular, Wesley Sneijder. The Real Madrid midfield player scored one of the goals of the tournament against Italy and came close to eclipsing it against France. “Sneijder is an important player for the Dutch,” Stark said. “His movement is so clever and he is the link between the midfield and whoever is up front. He is also deadly, either from dead-ball situations or just ordinary play.

“Players may come and go for Holland but the quality remains. The Dutch play a certain way and they stick to that. By all accounts, it is the players who tell Van Basten what system they want to use. People like to talk about formations because they feel it makes them more informed but really 4-4-2 in one person’s eyes is 4-1-4-1 in another’s. It is what the players do on the pitch that counts.

“Ruud van Nistelrooy is so comfortable on his own up front, with Rafael van der Vaart playing just behind. The midfield is the key area. They have started with Orlando Engelaar and Nigel de Jong in the middle, with Sneijder on the left and Dirk Kuyt on the right, who does a really good job even though he is not as gifted as the others, simply because of the work he puts in. That meant that two top players, Robin van Persie and Arjen Robben, could not even get into the team and I think that played a part in their desire to make an impact against France when they came off the bench and both scored.

“One of the main characteristics is that they like to get their full backs forward. That never changes with the Dutch. They take it off the goalkeeper all the time and play from the back. Giovanni van Bronckhorst has been exceptional as a left back. When he was at Rangers, he was one of the best central midfielders in our game, yet he’s adapted superbly.”

Stark’s brief is to inform Burley, not scare him, but finding any weaknesses is hard. “The reason you come to games is so you can see the full pattern of play or watch the movement of some players off the ball,” he said. “You cannot pick that up on television. George will watch the Dutch on DVD and probably go to some games himself and we will have the other teams in our World Cup qualifying group checked out as well. George and I get on well. We both came to the SFA within a couple of months of each other and we chat every day about football.”

However, it was Fleeting, Stark’s boss, who had initially taken first call on the Under-21 manager’s services to help the director of football to map out a course for the Pro-Licence candidates from the Scottish Premier League. “We had ten out in Salzburg last week, including John Hughes [of Falkirk] and Andy Millen [the St Mirren assistant] and this week we will have Ally McCoist and Ian Durrant [of Rangers], Craig Brewster [of Inverness Caledonian Thistle] and Gus MacPherson [of St Mirren].

“The Pro-Licence is mandatory now. We take them to Euro 2008 matches and then they have to write up reports on what they have seen. We are here to work, it’s not a holiday. We have group discussions every day. However, it’s not dry classroom stuff. It is real football talk. Jim Fleeting organised tickets for all the games, which was hard because they are like gold dust. We are also taking some of the candidates to watch a Russian training session. It will be great for them to see how someone like Guus Hiddink [the coach] works.”

The planning and organisation is a vivid contrast to when Stark took his Pro-Licence ten years ago. He and the late Tommy Burns paid their own way to attend the World Cup finals in France in 1998, but it gave him a memory that he now treasures, as Stark still tries to come to terms with the loss of the man at whose funeral he delivered a moving eulogy .

“Tommy and I went to Lyons and watched World Cup games,” Stark said. “We just did everything independently. We watched coaching sessions, too. We had a good laugh while we were doing it, trying to gather information from French newspapers that would help us when we wrote our reports. Now the Uefa Pro-Licence has moved on and so have football coaches. Everyone finds information on the internet. Tommy always wanted to learn. When he was Celtic manager, he went to Juventus to watch Marcello Lippi take training.”

Stark and Burns formed a management team at Kilmarnock and then Celtic, before the dismissal of Burns from Celtic Park in 1997 broke up the partnership. Stark became a manager in his own right at Morton, St Johnstone and Queen’s Park, before the SFA recognised his talent in March.

The move involved little upheaval. Queen’s Park are, of course, based at Hampden Park as well as the SFA. The job remit, however, has brought a degree of change. No more cold nights in Brechin or Stranraer. Stark is frequently out of the country, overseeing Scotland’s stars of the future, who will hopefully join Darren Fletcher and James McFadden one day.

“In May, I was in Turkey at the Uefa under-17 finals, where our team performed well,” Stark said. “The under-19s will be involved in their finals in October in Hungary. My own under-21 side have got games in Lithuania and Denmark soon.”

The under-17s and 19s both take part in their European Championship on an annual basis, but for the under-21s it is every two years.

“There is a lot of travel but I knew that would be a big part of the job,” Stark said. “I also have to get about to see players that I am considering for any of the squads. Next year, I want to stay more within Scotland. I want to get out to clubs and meet managers so that I can develop a good relationship with them. You can make all the plans in the world to try and be successful, but if you do not have a good relationship with the men on whom you rely to give you players, you will fail.

“It is a big contrast with my life over the last decade. Normally I would have taken my summer holiday by this time and be planning pre-season training. Anyone who works at a Scottish League club is back in gear by late June. You are looking for locations to take players on a run. The contrast with Euro 2008 – and watching some of the best players in the world – is huge. However, after spending the last 18 years working for one club or another, this job has given me a new lease of life.”