IAM a huge admirer of Scott Brown.

I have spoken for years about how highly I rate him. I love the way he gets stuck into players with big reputations and the will to win and desire he exhibits. He has more technique than many people give him credit for, he can get about the pitch and he can tackle. He has a bit of everything, basically, and that is why he has become a mainstay for Celtic and Scotland. Quite simply, he is the best Scottish player of his type of his generation.

Tying him up on a new four-year deal which will take him through to the summer of 2018 is a great piece of business by Celtic. It could help convince other players, such as John Guidetti to sign. But most of all, the fact Brown, now 29, is probably going to spend the rest of his career at Parkhead means they don't have to start looking for a combative midfielder with his level of technique to replace him.

That's all great, but I would have loved to have seen Scott play in the Barclays Premier League. I am not going to say he would have taken the English game by storm, but I think he could have cut it down there; I think he would have done well. But it is never going to happen now so we will never know.

For me that is a pity because it could have been the pinnacle of his career to play in that league and it is a shame he won't be doing so. We always want to be able to judge players at the highest level possible. While Brown does well when he plays at international level and in the Champions League, think of how everybody talks about Steven Naismith these days, how good a player he has become at Everton.

We are never going to get the chance to make the same judgments about Brown. How he would have fared in England's top league is a question that will always remain unanswered. There would have been an element of risk if Scott Brown had decided to move on. If he had gone down there and it hadn't gone well a lot of people would have come out of the woodwork pretty quickly to say they always knew he couldn't cut it at that level.

But I think should he have taken that gamble he would have passed the test with flying colours. I know it was Crystal Palace he was linked with, a team battling away for their lives. But if you asked me if I thought Scott Brown could go to a club such as Newcastle, Everton, or Tottenham and really look the part my answer would be yes.

You can think back to former Celtic midfielders such as Paul McStay, John Collins and Paul Lambert. While McStay is revered by the club's fans for staying at Parkhead for the duration of his career, I am not sure playing in England in those days was as big a lure as it is now. When people talked about McStay it was more that it would be good for him to test himself abroad. Collins and Lambert took the risk. And while in my opinion McStay was the best of the lot of them, did he have the best career? Not for me. Collins and Lambert probably had better careers than McStay because they went on to play at the top level at other big clubs, Collins reaching the Champions League semi-finals with Monaco and Lambert winning it with Borussia Dortmund. I am not saying this will rankle with McStay, but it is something he will hear people bringing up every so often. The same will happen with Scott. He might say he doesn't care if he never plays in England's top flight, but I would have liked to have been able to judge him there. If he had gone south I am pretty sure that before long I would have been saying the same things about him as I have been about Steven Naismith.