For those of us who lived through the sixties, seventies and eighties and believe something radical must happen if Scottish football is ever to regain anything approaching former glories, the departure of Ian Cathro from Hearts was the latest and perhaps biggest disappointment.

There were echoes of the treatment of Paul Le Guen at Rangers and Ronny Deila at Celtic in the way Cathro’s recruitment and early utterances were ridiculed and in the impatience of both pundits and punters with his failure to bring about immediate success at the level expected.

On a personal level I hold no particular brief for any of them individually. The unprecedented stranglehold of the Old Firm in terms of domestic trophies has, over the past 30 years and more, been stultifying in terms of the rest so there was no particular desire to see Le Guen or Deila move their respective clubs further from the pack, while my fellow Dundonian Cathro’s name was made producing a production line players for the club at, as far as I am concerned, the wrong end of Tannadice Street. However each brought the promise of the sort of cultural change that has transformed English football since it introduced Continental methodology 20 years ago.

As has always been the case Scottish football cannot do things on that scale since clubs do not have the wherewithal to scour the planet for the brightest superstars who are looking to move immediately into management or for the very best of the innovators who have made their reputations as coaches. Those recognising the need for change have consequently had to be more creative and, in their different ways, the appointments of Le Guen, Deila and Cathro have demonstrated how difficult that is to achieve within the existing Scottish football environment.

For Celtic and Rangers there is never any time or room in terms of manoeuvre since in both cases change must be accompanied by continuous on-field success. Both Le Guen and Deila must have been astonished by the ridicule generated by their attempts to bring about what they would have seen as obviously beneficial change in the lifestyles, in particular the diet of their players. The impact senior players can have in defying such initiatives was clearly demonstrated in both cases and in that context it was interesting recently to listen to Anna Signeul, the first coach to take a Scotland team to a major championships in close to two decades, outline the challenges she faced when she arrived at the SFA 12 years ago.

In seeking to bring about cultural change at the highest level of the women’s game she spoke of what effectively seem to have been three distinct generations of players when she took over. The older stagers who had the perspective of years of tried and tested methods having failed, were willing to commit to her methods, while the not yet established youngsters who knew nothing else were essentially eager to please their new boss. Her biggest problem lay with those at the peak of their careers who felt they were doing well as they were and did not need to change. To listen to her description they became pretty much a lost generation. For all the justified complaints from Scottish sportswomen about the media attention they receive, operating under the radar clearly worked to Signeul’s advantage in allowing time to implement change that would be seen as a necessity in other businesses and elite sporting organisations.

The hope within the men’s game was that with a successful businesswoman in charge, herself an outsider in terms of the traditional way of doing things in Scottish football and with expectations of silverware and even European qualification that bit lower, Hearts’ were operating at exactly the right level to be able to introduce the sort of innovative thinking that could prove transformational. Perhaps it was a case of the right approach, in terms of thinking outside the box, but poor execution in terms of this particular individual, but the sadness is that each setback of this sort not only represents a failure in itself, but makes it that bit harder to break from traditional methods that have been given all the time required to proven themselves utterly ineffective.