Not all the arrangements which awaited him at Celtic met with Tony Mowbray’s approval. A hectic pre-season, including a gruelling journey to Australia and back for a single match, surely presumed they would win the title and not have Champions League qualifiers to negotiate. There is also the Wembley Cup immediately before the first leg of the first qualifier and a home friendly with Sunderland sandwiched between it and the second leg. Although such games can be lucrative, they will become expensive should they prevent the club from reaching the Champions League group stage and Mowbray would have preferred a less arduous lead-in to his first major test as Celtic manager.

“Let’s not disguise it — this is a tough trip,” he said, referring to the friendly with Brisbane Roar next Sunday. “The benefits will be that I am going to be away with the team for six or seven days and will get to know them quite closely, how they react in certain situations. I will be living with them really, which is not a bad thing early on to get a feel for their personality, their characters. For physical preparation, I wouldn’t, personally, have taken it on, but I understand why. Manchester United do it every year, going to Asia or America to sell their brand. The bottom line is that Celtic is a global football club that does have a lot of supporters in parts of the world. I don’t sit here and stamp my feet and get upset about it.”

Yet in purely football terms, Mowbray would prefer to be closeted somewhere closer to home with his squad, honing their fitness and assessing their personalities away from the glare of such games. “It’s about balancing the sports science aspect of it,” he added. “I like making sure players have no excuses, taking the culture of excuses away from them by making sure the preparation is spot on and then it comes down only to the football. Arsenal never travel in pre-season. They go to Austria every year because there are no time zones to travel through, whereas Man United go all over the world. It doesn’t seem to do them much harm, Sir Alex [Ferguson] would say that to you as they’ve won championship after championship, but you could also argue he’s got two teams of world-class players he can put out at any given time and pick his fixtures. You often hear him talking about being stronger after Christmas, as the team grows and the momentum gets going. We have to qualify for the Champions League — as big games as you can find after what is a difficult pre-season — but I won’t be sitting here in a month making excuses.

“I will pick teams throughout the Wembley Cup [where Celtic face Al Ahly of Egypt then Spurs], for instance, that will be defined by the importance of games coming up just after it. People will pay a lot of money to go there hoping Celtic will play their best players but I have got to get the balance somewhere in amongst that. We can’t play the same 11 players throughout pre-season and turn them out at Wembley three days before we might have to travel halfway around the world to play a game. You can’t do it if you want to have a performance that is vital on a Tuesday night. You have to be mindful of that. We’ll get through it and make sure every player has enough game time so that when the big games come along they are physically and mentally ready.”

While the pre-season schedule is one which Gordon Strachan is unlikely to have approved of either, one of the former manager’s decisions, handing the captaincy to Stephen McManus in the summer of 2007, will be reconsidered by Mowbray in the month ahead. McManus will miss the start of the season as he recuperates from an operation on the patella tendon of his right knee and there is a growing constituency in the Celtic support advocating the armband passing permanently to Gary Caldwell, his centre-back partner. Caldwell was previously Mowbray’s captain at Hibs and his constructive style from the back, which is firmly in line with Mowbray’s principles, and self-confidence in front of the media make him the outstanding alternative.

For now, Mowbray is non-committal on the captaincy, but admits it is on his mind. “I’d be lying to you if I said I hadn’t thought about it but I don’t really think the time is right to get into it,” he said. “I’d imagine there will be a few captains in pre-season because the team is going to have to change a fair bit because of the number of games in close proximity of one another. I haven’t had a chat with Stephen yet, just a brief conversation in the corridor, but in the next week I’ll sit down with them and get a feel for it. I don’t know his own thoughts on the captaincy, I do know he’s a very imposing man, a huge man, a good man, he seems a gentleman to me, and I’ll see what he thinks, how much that decision would impact on him, positively or negatively. Captaincy is important for the standards you set. In a club like this, he has to lead by example in his on-field and off-field manner, the way he interacts with supporters, the way he deals with his teammates. Initially, he seems as though he would have the capability to deal with all those things no problem.”

Mowbray chose Jonathan Greening as his captain at West Bromwich Albion because “he was a very solid man and someone the players looked up to for talent rather than his leadership qualities on the field. He wasn’t a shake-the-fist type who was growling at people. He was technically very gifted and the team respected his immense talent. He was a very good man off the field, he respected the supporters and spoke well, so that was fine.”

One issue last season was some fans feeling McManus was staying in the team by virtue of the captaincy rather than his performances as he toiled with injuries. “If your captain isn’t performing, you can’t hurt the team,” responded Mowbray, quickly, to this point. “You’ve got to pick the best players.

“Lots of different managers do different things, some give it to the best player, some give it to the centre-half because he’s the one that roars at people. But when you’re with them every day you understand their personalities, you feel what the dressingroom respects, you get a feeling for how he deals with the pressure of talking in front of people and \the public persona of your football club — all these things are thrown into the mix. I sit here today and haven’t seen any reason why Stephen McManus doesn’t fit all those criteria, but I’d suggest there’s one or two others within the club who might also fit those criteria. We’ll find that out as we go along — but there might also be one or two signings that fit those criteria as well.”

In Caldwell, McManus, and Glenn Loovens, the Dutchman, he feels he has centre-backs who are better and more streetwise than the ones he signed for West Bromwich Albion last season after losing out on Madjid Bougherra to Rangers. He watched his team ripped apart on Saturday afternoons and then again on the Match of the Day sofas in the evening en route to relegation. He is confident his version of Celtic will prove cannier. “You will see this year, I hope, that we are not devoid of tactical awareness. I like to think you’ll see a football team that knows how to stop the opposition scoring.”