“No, I bet there aren’t.” No posed photographs, no in-depth interviews in the cuttings file, nothing beyond the scantiest of background material. Precious little beyond the bare bones -- the transfers and appearances data -- of a career which took him through nine clubs. We all know the name, we all know we watched Eddie May play countless times. Beyond that? Since coming into senior Scottish football a quarter of a century ago it is almost as if he has been determined to leave only the faintest footprint.

He likes that idea, likes the notion of being an unknown quantity. When he was presented as the manager of Falkirk in June he made a virtue of the fact that in five years as the head of their youth academy he could count the number of press interviews he had done without running out of fingers. The interesting thing about all of this is that for a quiet and unobtrusive guy May is utterly sure of himself. More than that, he is convinced that most other football clubs aren’t run as sens­ibly as Falkirk. When he goes to other grounds to watch games he doesn’t go in the directors’ box -- where managers tend to congregate and socialise -- but prefers to hide himself away in a quiet spot in the stand. Being seen as a bit of an outsider doesn’t bother him one little bit.

Some might describe such behaviour as odd; perhaps they would argue that it appears arrogant. For someone who has been in management for five minutes he seems to have made his mind up about what others are doing wrong. May would put it another way. He has very clear and singular views on how football clubs should be run and how managers should delegate their workload. So while he is respectful of his peers around the SPL clubs, he is on a different wavelength to most of them.

“I would hate for people to think I’m arrogant because that’s the last thing I am,” he said. “I keep my opinions to myself. I won’t walk into a room and be the centre of attention. When I go to watch a game, say at Hibs, I could be in the directors’ box if I wanted but I’ll be in the furthest corner of the stand, out of the road of everybody. I choose to be that way. People can talk and talk and talk and talk all they want. But I’m only here to talk to the players. I’m not here to talk about what I watched on ­television last night. I’m here to manage.”

The door opened for him when John Hughes left for Hibs and the Falkirk directors realised that none of the candidates to succeed him ticked quite as many boxes as the existing head of their youth academy. There was only one problem: who was he? “When the job came up the board asked if they could meet me. I said ‘for what reason?’ and they said ‘because we don’t know you’. After five years they didn’t know me! They said ‘we don’t know what kind of person you are’.

“So I told them I wasn’t being employed for what kind of person I was, it was for the kind of job I’ve done over the past five years and if that was good enough I’d get the manager’s job. I told them I wasn’t here to come round to their house for a coffee or a drink. I’m here to do a job.

“If I need advice I go to certain players who I played with for years. That’s what I do. Other than that, I get on great with a lot of people in football [his closest friend in the game is Owen Coyle] but I’ve got my own life. I’ve got a life after football. I hear people speaking about working 24 hours a day. If they’re doing that then clearly their club isn’t run properly. Why should you work 24 hours a day? It’s impossible.

“The best time of day for me is when you wake up in the morning beside your wife and you’ve got your two kids. I don’t take my work home with me because they don’t deserve that. If I’m in the house shouting about this and that all the time they’ll turn out as thugs. They are there to grow up in the proper manner and how I conduct myself with them will determine how they grow up.”

May talks in a quiet, controlled manner which doesn’t disguise a sense of understated toughness about him. When I suggest this might stem from where he grew up he quickly puts me right. “I’m from West Pilton in Edinburgh but I don’t buy into that rubbish about working class upbringings making you tough. It’s about how your parents bring you up that’s important. I had all I needed as a kid. I had a house, I was fed, my mum and dad weren’t alcoholics or taking drugs. They had a normal life and they were always very respectful to everybody. I’m like that. I’m quiet but I’m assured and I know what I want.”

He wanted a better start to the season. He is only 5ft 7in but those who might like to see him cut down a peg or two haven’t been short of ammunition. Falkirk were immediately eliminated from the Europa League qualifiers by Vaduz of Liechtenstein, one of the more humbling results in Scottish football. They went into yesterday’s match against Kilmarnock bottom of the SPL and without a domestic win all season. When they got their first point of the campaign after starting with three straight defeats, May walked into his post-match press conference and said: “I’m officially not the worst manager in Britain now.” Last midweek Celtic rested most of their main men for a 
Co-operative Insurance Cup tie at Falkirk and still ran in four unanswered goals.

That heaped injury on what has been an eventful, difficult first three months in the job. There was Vaduz. There was a training ground row which led to Neil McCann being punished and then ­leaving the club. There was May’s claim that some Falkirk players dropped their work-rate when Hughes’s back was turned last season, which was in turn interpreted as a criticism of the ­previous manager. Former striker Steve Lovell listened to a radio interview and was convinced May had implied he was a slacker. He told The Sun that May’s attitude and way of working was “appalling” and claimed he would sue the club for breach of contract unless he got an ­apology. He’ll have a long wait for that.

May is quietly adamant that he would never be disrespectful of Hughes and suggests it is mischief-making to claim otherwise. “If people want me to fail, they’ll want me to fail. I’m only aware of one person who came out with a different opinion to myself. If people heard what I said on the radio there was never anything disrespectful. [Lovell] could only train twice a week. I didn’t dictate that, it was a medical decision. I need players who could train all the time. I took advice and he couldn’t do that all the time. I don’t know what he misheard, but that’s what I said on the radio. I offered Steven the chance to meet a couple of times before he put anything in the papers and he didn’t want to meet me.”

Might the fall-out end up in court? A smile and a shrug of the shoulders. “If it does, it does.

“Some people are very nervous about coming to see me for something or other. Players and certain other staff. They know the reaction they’ll get if they’re ‘at it’. That is a respect issue which I’ve built up here over five years. You can’t rule by fear. I won’t be ­horrible to anyone. I’ll just pick apart what they’re saying if I don’t like it. And then the next time they won’t even ask.”

Falkirk bought into May’s managerial concept lock, stock and barrel and gave him a three-year contract which effectively included an agreement that he could not be sacked in the first 18 months. He mapped out an extensive chain of command in which the manager is responsible only for the first team, not finance, scouting, youth development, the medical side or anything else which distracts the men in charge of most clubs. What about the argument that having total control hadn’t done Sir Alex Ferguson any harm? “Aye. Great. And how many Alex Fergusons are there?”

In his own career he was a trainee at Dundee United before spells at Hibs, Brentford, Falkirk, Motherwell, Dunfermline, Airdrie, Western Knights in Australia, Berwick Rangers and then Falkirk again. So at the age of 42, and after all of those years at the coalface of Scottish football, who did he base his model on? St Etienne. The French club made a huge impression when he went behind-the-scenes there as part of a coaching course.

He personally chose Steven Pressley and Alex Smith as his assistants and is unperturbed by speculation that the two of them -- higher profile and better known to the media -- are waiting in the wings to take over if he fails.

“If they are good enough to take over the job then I’d be the first to shake their hands. But I know their motives are to help the club, to help me along, and also to help their own careers along the way.” Pressley takes the training sessions and structures the shape of the team according to May’s wishes. Smith offers coaching and other input. The three of them discuss every issue -- Pressley and Smith both pop their heads round the door during the conversation -- but May has the final say.

Is it going to work? Even if it does, he plans to leave Falkirk in 2012. “If I’m here for three years I’ll have done a good job for Falkirk and it’ll be time for me to leave. I’ll be surprised if I’m here longer than three years. That’s what I’ve said to my wife. If I’m good at management, great. I’ll then make the decision on whether to continue or whether to go back to academy level. Three years will be a long time at the football club and, remember, I’ve already been here for five. I never took this job for money. I would think I’ll be the lowest paid manager in the SPL. I got paid very little as the academy manager as well. People would burst out laughing if I said what I was on. So my motivation isn’t money.”

May has been successful at keeping journalists at a distance and he suspects that some of the negative coverage of Falkirk this season has been about “trying to coax me out, to see what type of character I am”.

That was the motivation for this 
interview as well. Let’s call it a draw.