Former Bluebird Mackay takes charge of Scotland

FORMER Cardiff City manager Malky Mackay will take interim charge of Scotland while the search for Gordon Strachan’s successor begins.

Mackay, the Scottish Football Association’s performance director, will oversee a friendly against Holland at Pittodrie on November 9.

SFA chief executive Stewart Regan made the announcement at a media conference where he revealed the governing body board felt it was “time for a change” when discussing Strachan’s future on Thursday.

Regan said: “Ultimately we are in a result business. We had a manager in place for five years coming up. He’d had two campaigns. When the board met to discuss Gordon’s position after the defeats to England and Slovakia, we backed the manager, but we backed the manager on the proviso that we made the play-offs.

“We didn’t reach the play-offs and we felt it was time for a new coach to give us a new impetus with emerging talent coming through the Scottish game and give us a real chance to make Euro 2020.”

Regan claimed Strachan had given no indication of whether he wanted to continue, but simply asked the SFA board to decide how they wanted to proceed.

Mackay was a controversial appointment as performance director in December last year after being the subject of an 11-month probe into a series of text messages while at the Bluebirds.

And Regan gave little away on whether Mackay would be involved in the recruitment process or a candidate himself.

“Malky’s the performance director,” he said. “He has got a big job to do and a number of challenges that he is working on at the moment.

“To be fair to Malky he has responded to the board’s request. We asked him to take the team in Aberdeen and he was delighted to do so.”