With the greatest of respect to Scott McTominay, accomplished player that he is, comparisons to Eric Cantona have probably not been too plentiful throughout his Manchester United career. But for a spell a little over a year ago, he had adopted one of the Frenchman’s infamous and less desirable traits.

In the lead up to Scotland’s opening qualifier for the European Championships against Cyprus this time last year, McTominay was in the huff. He hadn’t started a game for his club in the English Premier League since a loss to Arsenal in late January and had to wait for FA cup ties to roll around get any meaningful game time.

He turned up for international duty in late March as usual, and consciously, he would never give anything less than one hundred percent for his country. But Scotland head coach Steve Clarke could sense there was something amiss with one of his key men.

A heart-to-heart followed, and so too did a double against Cyprus and yet another two goals to seal a famous win over Spain. Suddenly, McTominay’s frown had been turned upside down, as had his form.

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The weight that had been lifted from his shoulders saw him become a major goal threat for both Scotland and Manchester United, allowing him to force his way into Eric ten Haag’s thinking on a much more regular basis.

McTominay might not be Cantona, then, and he’d be the first to admit it. But his importance to both club and country cannot be underestimated, and the modest Man United star credits Clarke with a large portion of the credit for his remarkable turnaround in his fortunes – and his mood.

“That was the camp where the manager and I sat down and he said that I didn’t look happy, that I didn’t look like I was smiling about the place,” McTominay said.

“I thought, ‘Maybe he’s right.’ I went and spoke to my mum, my dad, my girlfriend at the time and they all pretty much said the same thing.

“Sometimes, you just need to enjoy football and play with a smile on your face and take it easy. Not everything’s the end of the world if you’re not playing so well and you’re not in the team, whatever.

“Ever since that, to be fair, I’ve just thought ‘Let’s go for it’. It was a weight lifted off my shoulders. It just shows you that by speaking to someone – especially the manager because he’s honest and he’ll tell you up front – it can make a significant difference.

“He just said he wanted to see the kid who was happy whenever he first came on the scene and was playing every week. He saw a boy who was smiling all the time.

“Now I look back and think, yeah, maybe sometimes the pressure and stuff like that can mount and you don’t realise it can affect you. Sometimes it does a little bit, and you just need to take a step back and say ‘Listen, let’s just play football, how it was as a kid and enjoy it.’

“I wasn’t playing at that time, so I had pressure on myself to play. I don’t like it whenever I’m not playing. It hurts me whenever I’m not playing. So, I’m obviously going to be upset whenever I come into camp. I’m running into the training ground, I’m not sulking, but I’m wanting to play. It’s your livelihood, you want to be a part of it as much as possible.

“After that conversation, obviously things click a little bit and you just think ‘Do you know what, you’ve got one career, you might as well go for it while you’re here.’

“You are always going to have difficult periods in your career where it’s not easy and you are going to find it hard to take a step back and reflect on where you’ve come from and where you want to get to.

“Sometimes a conversation with the manager can be the best thing for you. It resets your brain, it resets your mind, and you think, ‘You know what, I can do this.’

“If I am good enough and capable enough to play every game in the team then I want to show that I can gain peoples’ trust.”

He has certainly gained Clarke’s, and the feeling is more than mutual. McTominay’s remarkable goal rush over the past year has largely been credited to an inspired positional tweak from the Scotland head coach, but the midfielder says it has as much to do with the belief he has imbued in him as anything else.

“I’ve never really lacked confidence, to a certain degree,” he said.

“I’ve always prided myself on how no matter how well I’m doing, or how poorly I played, the next game I’ll still show myself, I’ll still want the ball. I won’t shy away from anything.

“I’ve always wanted to be the player who doesn’t look that type of way, a nervy character.

“Sometimes I think things just click. You find yourself higher up the pitch and you score more goals. It’s a progression from there.

“It was more just a case of, if you have a little bit more licence to get in the box, then you have to make the most of it.

“If there are four or five times when you can get in the box then let’s make use of it.”

It’s all a far cry from the days when McTominay was being pressed into action as an auxiliary centre back for his country.

“Obviously in myself I know that I was a doing that for the team, but deep down I knew that I want to be in the box, and I want to be using my legs and my power to get through midfield and get in the box and score,” he said.

“But you can never sulk and say ‘Bloody hell, what’s happening here like?’. No, you’ve just got to take it step by step with the team and if that’s the role you’re given, then you take it and prove yourself that you are capable of doing that.

“Then, when the time comes you could maybe have a little conversation, but I never had to because the manager is so good with me and he would always ask me certain types of things.

“I never had to go and knock on his door and say ‘What is happening here? I want to play here.’ He knows that I want to do that, and that’s just the way that it went really.”

Given how prolific McTominay has become, it was with some surpris that the Tartan Army watched him join with his teammates in passing up several glorious opportunities in the ultimately thumping defeat to the Dutch in Amsterdam on Friday night.

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You sense a determination to put that right against Northern Ireland at Hampden this evening, and to not accept such wastefulness as they exhibited in the Johan Cruyff Arena. And certainly not the late collapse that made a more than creditable performance to that point seem inconsequential.

“No way [can we accept that], because the last 20 minutes, we know ourselves with the standards,” McTominay said.

“For the first 70 minutes, yeah, it was good, but we have to score. We understand that we have to score.

“It’s not even a case of ifs, buts or maybes, you have to score the goals when you get presented the opportunities we had, myself included.

“If you win and the team plays well then it gives everybody a boost. That’s what we want for Scotland, playing against really good teams. We are playing some of the top international teams in the world and I feel like we have more than held our own. We have just been really unfortunate a couple of times.

“But there will be a couple of games coming up when people will realise that we can bang three or four in and suddenly it’s a different story.”

*Scott McTominay was speaking as he was named as the William Hill Scottish Football Writers’ Association Men's International Player of the Year.