PEOPLE always used to say that Alex McLeish was a ‘lucky’ manager.

This, of course, was a rather back-handed compliment – if indeed it ever was one.

Was it luck, for instance, which saw his Rangers team hold their nerve better than Martin O’Neill era Celtic in those frenzied final day shoot-outs in 2003 and 2005?

Well at least partially - or so his detractors would say. As the man himself candidly admitted later, he at least was in command at Ibrox at a time when the club’s use of EBTs essentially allowed Rangers to “pay the same kind of money Celtic were paying their players”.

Okay, so all this was way above McLeish’s pay grade, and soon became a legal whirlwind which would devastate the club down the line, but it certainly didn’t hurt his chances of competing for titles in the short term.

Was it good fortune too that saw his Birmingham team, who have since tumbled down the divisions, getting the better of Arsenal in an English national cup final back in 2011?

Again, his detractors would say yes, their exhibit A being the fact Obafemi Martins rolled the winning goal that day into an empty net after Laurent Koscielny and Wozciech Szczesny had cleaned each other out just six yards from goal.

There are a couple of inconvenient truths for this analysis, though, not least the class of an Arsenal side featuring stars like Robin Van Persie and Andriy Arshavin, and the fact that Szczesny shouldn’t even have been on the park then, after his last man foul on Lee Bowyer was erased by an errant offside flag.

That brave qualifying run with Scotland last time around? Luck again.

From a last-minute winner which ran down Craig Beattie’s shin on his debut against Georgia, to French goalkeeper Mickael Landreau slapping the ball into his own net one night in Paris when James McFadden- Scotland barely got up the park, the naysayers would claim this as a charmed campaign. At least, that is, until the luck only finally ran out when Spanish referee Manuel Enrique Mejuto Gonzalez invented a free-kick against Alan Hutton and Cristian Panucci headed in the sickener.

But whether you think it is all good luck, or simply good guidance, thankfully the big man was at it again on Tuesday night – racking up positive results for Scotland.

Only in relation to someone like McLeish could you hear it being cogently argued, as I did on Tuesday night, that actually missing the best part of 12 players through withdrawals and injuries was actually a stroke of good luck.

Knowing his options in almost all areas of the team were severely limited by this churn, McLeish knew he had little option but to forget all about about 3-4-3 shapes and the like: Scotland turned to a 4-4-1-1 with two flying wingers in Ryan Fraser and James Forrest, and the rest was history.

Even if you don’t buy that analysis, where McLeish certainly can thank his lucky stars is the arrival of this new Uefa Nations League tournament. Having to overcome just Albania and Israel in a three-team group to land a one-legged semi-final and final against Finland then either Serbia or Norway (assuming none qualify automatically before then) in March 2020 is the kind of backdoor chance his predecessors would have jumped at.

It may be out of fashion in this stat-heavy modern era of predicted goals and such like, but like it or not luck still has a part to play in sport. Think Sir Alex Ferguson’s two Champions League wins, one seemingly delivered by God in the final stages against Bayern Munich in 1999 then the second which owed it all to John Terry slipping on his posterior during a penalty shoot-out. Think Andy Murray at the 2012 US Open, when a hurricane gave him an extra day’s rest on Novak Djokovic ahead of the final.

So if Alex McLeish is a lucky manager, then bring it on. He might not have been everyone’s cup of tea - I was personally surprised that Steve Clarke was overlooked - but the least big Eck deserves is respect. However the alchemy has happened, he has got something started with Scotland here which might just take us all the way to a major finals. To paraphrase that old Garry Player line, the better this Scotland team gets the luckier they might just get too.