GORDON STRACHAN needs players on Sunday used to dealing with the biggest occasion and who have the wherewithal emerge from desperate must-win situations with the right result.

Anything other than a win against Slovenia, these days a better team than us, will mean the manager either walks or is sacked. The World Cup dream has all-but gone already but a draw or defeat will see us become a laughing stock.

Strachan needs proper players with big personalities who can cope with such football matches.

Good job, then, he has six Celtic players in his squad for whom must-win games come every week and just happen to be full of confidence, having the season of their lives and at least this half dozen have recent and relative European experience.

Craig Gordon should be in goal, Kieran Tierney at left-back (if the best young Scottish player in years doesn’t start I’m becoming Norwegian), Scott Brown and Stuart Armstrong in central midfield, James Forrest on the right and Leigh Griffiths up front.

Add Charlie Mulgrew into that mix, a Celtic player up until last summer, and there are seven guys who have lived every day with pressure, in terms of professional football, and have time and again coped with these situations.

The other positions could be made up of Ikechi Anya, our only right-back who isn’t actually a right-back, Christophe Berra at the centre of defence, Tom Cairney in midfield and Robert Snodgrass playing on the left of Griffiths.

It is slim pickings; however, isn’t it about time Strachan looked at what he had, picked guys on form and/or play for teams which happen to be doing well?

There will be some horrified at the thought of six players from one team starting, especially from the God awful Scottish Premiership which is a step beneath a Sunday Pub League for the morbidly obese, and who believe the English Championship is a level Pele might have struggled with.

The English Championship is bang-average. Celtic are not. There are few players down there who would get into Brendan Rodgers’s team. Don’t be fooled by the propaganda from south of the border.

It might not work – this is Scotland after all – but let’s see what happens by fielding a team full of players who know one another and have experience of going into genuinely massive matches and getting through them because of their mind-set.

And not go with any player on the evidence that he did quite well against Derby County and Cardiff City.

Armstrong hasn’t been capped yet but that shouldn’t matter. He is the best player in this country right now and that should mean he gets picked. Germany, Spain and France tend to do look at their own crop, see who is doing better than anyone else, and then write down his name on the team sheet.

If it’s good enough for them, it is good enough for the 67th ranked team in the world.

Griffiths hasn’t been playing as much, none of the strikers have been, but he scores goals and has done so against a standard opposition his rivals for the position of loan striker have only seen on television.

Brown should be captain. With the greatest respect to Darren Fletcher who deserves that and more, it’s been some time since he’s had a good game in the dark blue. Brown is having the campaign of his life. It’s his team to lead.

Within Celtic circles, bringing up the pros and cons of Forrest can start a fight in an empty house. Indeed, there doesn’t even have to be a house such are the arguments brought on by the winger’s inconsistency.

However, he has produced his best against the best. Give Forrest the freedom to run at players without having to worry too much about tracking back and he might just have one of his nights when he looks like a world beater.

Just the other week, Fraser Forster gave an interview to the English press and spoke of how the pressure of being Premiership player with Southampton, and in the international set-up, was nothing compared to his Celtic days. This is not a line.

With the best will in the world, the Championship players, bar one or two exceptions, who have been continually played ahead of those at Celtic in recent times don’t know what it’s like to play for a football club that is the story every single day.

I wouldn’t mind if, say, Armstrong was overlooked because the other guy in his position is lording it at the top of the Premier League. But the last time I looked Graeme Souness was long retired.

Scotland fans should put aside their bias against Celtic, and let’s be clear that exists, because if they want their team to win, that team should be full of winners.