Smith was right to trust his instincts

NORTHERN IRELAND manager Michael O’Neill used two words yesterday to sum up why he turned down Scotland. Gut instinct. When a job is right, it’s right. Hesitation or doubt tells its own story. That’s why Walter Smith made the right decision to pull the plug on talks with the SFA. Managing the national team is the wrong gig for a man whose gut instinct tells him to walk away. Two weeks short of his 70th birthday and happily retired, the Rangers legend took the call and asked himself if he really needed the grief? Had the SFA made a swift, quiet, decisive move, the answer might have been yes. But they didn’t. Smith is now the second man to say no thanks and there is an obvious question here. What was it O’Neill and Smith heard which informed their gut instincts? The failure to make the Ibrox icon a firm offer will be seen as evidence of a dithering, unimpressive SFA hierarchy. But it’s just over a week since the governing body were copping flak for sticking all their eggs in a basket with O’Neill’s face on the side. To turn around now and hammer them for sifting through a shortlist of candidates is downright hypocritical. When it came to Smith, the SFA were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. Rangers fans thought it was a great idea to get him back. Others clearly found it trickier to separate the man from his past. Stuck in the middle were the sizeable number of fans who couldn’t fathom what the hell the SFA were playing at. Follow a selection process by all means. But to go from targeting the manager of Northern Ireland to a man who has been out of the game since 2011 seemed a slightly random, scattergun strategy. Four months since they lost the last manager, a cash-strapped SFA are now back where they started. Humming and hawing over Alex McLeish and asking themselves the question. Could performance director Malky Mackay still save them a few quid by doing both jobs?