GORDON Greer is convinced that his hopes of keeping hold of his Scotland jersey rest upon new Brighton boss Sami Hyypia following the club's recent successful managerial blueprint, writes Stewart Fisher.
The 33-year-old central defender has started the last four international matches under Gordon Strachan, and is desperate to make it five when Scotland commence their Euro 2016 qualifying campaign with an arduous trip to Dortmund to face Germany in September.
Much, however, will depend upon the former Liverpool defender valuing Greer's ability to pass the ball out from the back, just as his previous two club managers, Gus Poyet and Oscar Garcia, have done before him.
"That is what every player strives for, to play the big games," said Greer. "For me I just want to start the season in good form for Brighton. If that gets me playing in front of 70,000 in Dortmund then great.
"Most managers want to play football," he added. "But when I went to Brighton under Gus Poyet it was different, we actually controlled the game from the back. I was on the ball a lot, and he gave us a lot of responsibility. Something changed in me, and people started to realise that I could pass it.
"Under Oscar it was the same. So it is a wee bit weird at the moment because you just don't know what kind of philosophy the manager is going to have, how he wants to play."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article