'Real jealousy' - Steven Naismith reflects on quitting Scotland to focus on Hearts and learning to be less impetuous

A 2-1 loss to St Mirren the previous day had proved the final straw. It was the eighth consecutive defeat suffered by Naismith’s misfiring team, who had finished third the previous season. He learned the news via a phone call from Tynecastle chief executive Andrew McKinlay, sat for 20 minutes taking it in and then cleared his desk and headed home to Ayrshire. Among other coping mechanisms, he enrolled on a baking course.

Like the sourdough loaves he is now expert at, things are turning out just fine. Of course, he could be forgiven if he had started cursing his decision to throw in his lot with Hearts. It meant giving up his post as Scotland assistant coach at a critical time.

With Naismith on the sidelines as a member of Steve Clarke’s coaching team, Scotland had beaten Spain in their previous match and were on course for Euro 2024 when he stepped aside just before a pivotal late comeback win in Norway.

Granted, the chance to take over at Hearts in June 2023 was unmissable. It provided many memorable moments for such a young coach as well as some occasions he'd like to forget. Furthermore, it might be viewed as beneficial to his career prospects not to have been at Euro 2024, so dire did it turn out for Scotland.

He’s been re-employed now. Clarke has brought Naismith back on board following John Carver’s permanent relocation to Poland, where he’s taken over at Lechia Gdansk.

Naismith, still only 38, has injected some youth back into the backroom staff, where 67-year-old Alan Irvine and 65-year-old goalkeeper coach Chris Woods are the 62-year-old Clarke’s other auxiliaries.

Having won his last international cap as relatively recently as 2019, Naismith can function as a bridge to the players. He can still talk their language. He does though crave something the majority of them have experienced, which is involvement at a major finals. While Scotland were in Germany last summer, he was consumed by Hearts. As a player, Euro 2020 came just too late.

He admits stepping away from the international scene to take over at Tynecastle had been a bind. “There was real jealousy there because you're just on the back of beating Spain at home,” he reflected. “It's a significant moment – you go, 'if we do what we have been doing, we make it'.

"I'd missed out as a player. You're coming to the end and you're trying to hang on and then you don't make it. I'd spent the last 20 years thinking about it from a player's point of view.

“Listen, these are these moments in football that come along and you've got to make the decision. I made it. Fortunately, the manager has seen that I can add value at this moment.”

By 'this moment', he means the upcoming 11 or so weeks, when Scotland’s hopes of making it to next year's World Cup can be fulfilled or might very well be extinguished. There is also the possibility of securing a play-off place. Whatever happens, it all depends on a short, six-game burst starting on Friday night, when Scotland face Denmark in Copenhagen. Naismith is loving being reunited with the players, some of whom he once played alongside.

“I definitely feel better because I feel refreshed,” he said. “I'm working much less than I was! On the reflection side of it, you learn a lot. You think, ‘If I go back in, I’m going to do this differently’.”

He has learned to be less impetuous, to allow a game to develop before making judgements. It’s something Carver taught him in his previous spell with Scotland. “The way he analysed the first 15 minutes of a game, I took a lot from it,” he said. “Because you're young and you're desperate, you're seeing everything happening. It might have happened once and you're thinking, ‘we need to continue doing that’. But the game's not settled yet. He was very good at that.”

He is also grateful to Clarke. Naismith cautions those who assume this campaign will prove to be the manager’s last, as the man himself has suggested. Naismith does also concede that he’s being slightly selfish in his desire to see Clarke stick around.

“I'd like to stick around for as long as possible!” he said. “I think there's probably been more made of it than he actually feels. He's a guy who's pretty realistic. He'll know when the time's right. There's still loads that can be done with this squad currently and with what's coming through. I'm pretty certain he won't know deep down right now what he wants to do at the end of his contract.”

So much rests on World Cup qualification. Naismith can relay a few hard luck stories, including coming up short for Russia 2018 in Gordon Strachan’s last campaign in charge.

“Too many, too many!” he said, when asked to recall moments that keep him awake at night. “At least one, maybe two on every campaign. What probably helps in the next three months is how condensed it is, it's small margins. One result can be the difference. We're sitting in a group where everybody will sit there and feel we've got a chance here to go through.

“That tells us that if we really focus, really have that fight and determination to do the stuff that's not necessarily ability-related, you give yourself a good opportunity. We've got players in the prime of their career who have been to tournaments and who probably have ticked every other box. This is just the next one. It's there and you can see what's there at the end of it. Optimism has to be high.”