Craig Brown: Brown has no reason to envy his Scotland successor

Preston North End manager applies experience gained as national coach north of the border to different challenge

There are times when Craig Brown CBE misses being manager of Scotland, but neither in body or spirit will he be at Hampden Park this afternoon, where the Scots take on Lithuania in a vital European Championship qualifier.

Instead he will be watching Rotherham v Millwall. Brown is manager of Preston North End now, and although Preston don't have a game today, to be at Hampden would be "irresponsible", he says.

So he turned down Radio Five Live's invitation to be an analyst at Hampden, turned down the opportunity to bask in the warmth of fans who remember him more for guiding Scotland to Euro '96 and the 1998 World Cup than for missing out in 2000 and 2002, in favour of running the rule over Millwall, his team's opponents on Tuesday.

That said, Brown still enjoys the drama surrounding big international weekends, and of course the drama has rarely been greater than in the run-up to today's Turkey v England match. He says he must "tiptoe" through the Rio Ferdinand affair, but is forthright none the less.

"You can't have a cavalier disregard for [drugs] testing. That shows a lack of respect for the system... After a hearing he could maybe have been disciplined, but as [the Professional Footballers' Association chief executive] Gordon Taylor says, he's been convicted without trial.

"I heard a Uefa chap saying that if the England players had pulled out, it would have put England in real trouble with Uefa, but there would have been no trouble if they'd played Ferdinand. So why should they shoot themselves in the foot? I feel sorry for the manager. Through no fault of his own he's been deprived of one of his biggest assets. If that had happened while I was with Scotland I'd have felt upset. Ferdinand should be considered innocent until proven guilty. We know he didn't turn up for the test, but..." - here a twinkle enters Brown's eyes - "... what about Fergie [his old pal Sir Alex Ferguson]? He got off a speeding charge because he had diarrhoea. The guy could have had diarrhoea."

Drug-testing loomed large, he says, during his seven years managing Scotland, indeed the Scottish team doctor, Professor Hillis, was in charge of drug-testing at Euro 2000. "Whenever the players arrived, he would sit them down and give them a talk about banned substances. If they were on any medication for anything they had to tell him, but he would reassure them that there would be absolute confidentiality. 'If you've got gonorrhoea and are getting treatment, come and tell me'..."

Brown chuckles, while I muse that this is the first interview I have ever conducted to feature both diarrhoea and gonorrhoea. Brown chuckles a great deal. He is one of football's most engaging and popular men, an inveterate story-teller whose very best anecdotes are, alas, the unprintable ones. We are lunching in a cafe at Deepdale, adjacent to the national football museum which he urges me to visit before my train departs. But the time to visit a museum is before lunch with Craig Brown, not afterwards. So long do we blether that I end up with scarcely 10 minutes in the museum, just enough time to admire a superb statue of Sir Tom Finney, Preston North End's cherished president.

"He comes in on Fridays," says Brown, "and you know, I've never seen so much fan mail in my life. Letters from all over the world. What a lovely man he is. But his wife's very ill and he's old school. He's nursing her himself.

"He tries to see as many home games as he can and has never once voiced a word of criticism. If we lose or play badly, he's always sympathetic. He's terrific." We'll come back to the subject of Preston, to the starkly contrasting demands of international management and daily life in the Nationwide First Division. But first: Berti Vogts. Brown's successor in the Scotland job.

The German has had mixed fortunes and the Sauchiehall Street jury is still out, although they might file back in with thumbs up today if the team cements a European Championship play-off place. To do so, Scotland need to beat Lithuania, and hope that Germany do not succumb at home to Iceland.

Brown insists that he has not partaken of even the tiniest dram of schadenfreude while watching Vogts wrestle with the difficulties of managing Scotland. "In my heart of hearts, no. I'm personally very friendly with Berti. He managed the Germany Under-21s when I managed the Scotland Under-21s, and he was an assistant to Beckenbauer at the 1986 World Cup when I was on Alex Ferguson's staff.

"There's a great story about that... We had to play Germany in the second game, and Beckenbauer sent Berti to spy on our training, to see whether Strachan was fit or not. But Fergie had made the training private and Berti couldn't get in. Berti showed great initiative. He had a German team jersey on, and saw these guys pulling barrels of Coca-Cola into the stadium, so he swapped his jersey for the Coca-Cola man's overalls, wheeled a barrel in, watched the whole session, and went back and told Beckenbauer that Strachan was fit. I still call Berti the Coca-Cola man. He likes it, I think.

"He's been good to me over the years. I remember going over to Bremen to watch Germany play. I phoned Berti, and he said: 'Come on the team bus to the game'. That's when I noticed Teutonic discipline. The players are always on the bus 15 minutes before it departs, and they all have their own seat. Paul Lambert told me that when he went to Dortmund he sat down at the front of the team bus and was told to move; he was in someone else's seat. Here, the drill is that the manager gets on and says to the physio, 'are they all on? Count 'em.' In Germany the manager doesn't even have to look over his shoulder. There's not the slightest doubt that they're all there. He's the last man on, and as soon as he's on, the bus goes. In Scotland it's 'right, who's not here? Who's away phoning the bookie?'''

I ask Brown about the some of the more difficult players he had to handle as Scotland manager. Did the incendiary Don Hutchison, recalled to the squad for today's match, ever cause him problems? "Never. He was fantastic for me. He's a midfield player predominantly, but we didn't have a striker, and I thought he could hold the ball up like Sutton does for Celtic. In fact he's a better technician than Sutton. He always gave you everything he had, and was always very supportive of the regime. There's always the odd player who complains. Why are we doing this? Why are we not doing that? Why aren't we training in tracksuit bottoms, it's cold.

"People say it must be hard to handle the big stars, but I've found the very opposite. The bigger the star, the easier he was. I've a young boy here; I tell him: 'You've had two shites at Deepdale, will you shut up!' You have to bring them down to earth. But when I was assistant Scotland manager, Dalglish was still in the squad, Souness, Strachan, those guys... and they were a dream. So professional, so focused. But I had a wee guy with six caps who thought he was..." The dog's bollocks? "Aye. But in a humorous kind of way. That's one thing I've noticed. The banter's good enough here, but there was far more in the Scottish dressing-room. I know my experience is limited in England but other Scottish players say the same. What has impressed me here is the work ethic. All credit to [his predecessor] Davie Moyes. The players want to be exhausted after a training session. They expect it."

When Brown stepped down as Scotland manager, he was offered, and took, a role as director of Scottish football development. "And that was a smashing job. A nice salary, nice car, nice office, and you never lose a game. Howard Wilkinson had the same job in England, but left it to mastermind Sunderland's recovery..." Which, of course, Wilkinson conspicuously failed to do. But Brown's implication is that a football man needs football, and you can't smell the Ralgex from behind a desk. So when Preston made an approach, he talked to Moyes, liked what he heard, and accepted. Like Vogts in his old job, though, he had a pretty successful act to follow. And there have been times, particularly at the start of this season with Preston struggling, when his tenure has seemed precarious. But the team is on the rise now; relegation no longer looks more likely than promotion.

"In any analysis of how a manager's doing," says Brown, "you need to look at the wage bill of the club. Last year, Coventry's wage bill was £16m. Ours is £4m. But we had a transfer profit of over a million last year, and our league position was 12th. A realistic objective now is the play-offs. After all, we're competing against West Ham, West Brom, Ipswich, clubs with comparatively huge resources. But there's a supporter here, an old dear, who grabs me and says: 'Stop talking about the play-offs, we want automatic promotion'." That old dear, like most football fans, embodies the triumph of hope over experience. And if anyone should understand that phenomenon, it's a former manager of Scotland. I ask Brown how, having talked about an era of Scottish football which featured Dalglish, Souness and Strachan, he explains the relative poverty of talent now.

"Luck has a lot to do with it," he says. "Sometimes a crop comes through at the same time. In fact there's a Scottish Under-21 crop just now... The boy Fletcher at Manchester United, a terrific young player. People knock Scottish football but the England Under-21s failed to qualify for the European Championships while Scotland are virtually certain to qualify.

"Whatever country you are, you have to encourage the growth of players under 21. The French solved it. They failed to qualify for the 1990 World Cup, failed to qualify in 1994, then in 1998 they won it. So what happened between '94 and '98? I'll tell you. Gérard Houllier, who was national coach, had power and he had brains. He said that every French club was allowed only 20 players over the age of 21. Every other player under contract had to be under 21." I tell Brown that I have been known to air some dim opinions of Houllier in these pages, wondering how many more tens of millions he will be allowed to spend before he and Liverpool stop needing "another two or three years" to reclaim the summit of English football?

He listens politely, then adds: "But he changed things round for France. When he played for Monaco, John Collins told me that they had a couple of suspensions, and because [the manager Jean] Tigana wasn't allowed to sign any more strikers over 21, he had to bring in two young boys. Those two boys were Trezeguet and Henry. And 18 months later Henry was in the French national team. If Houllier had not had his way, the boy might have been left to continue his education in the reserves. I suggested the same thing in Scotland but Rangers and Celtic objected. They said that it would make an uneven playing field in Europe if the likes of Bayern Munich were allowed 30 full-time pros and they only had 20. So I said: 'Then how come Celtic got humped by Lyon last season?'" Another chuckle. Brown's mobile phone rings. It is someone asking whether, at Preston's next home match, to mark anti-racism week, he will permit a troupe of dancing girls on the pitch prior to kick-off? "Aye," he says. "And send them into the manager's office afterwards."

Craig Brown the life and times

Born: 1 July 1940, Lanarkshire.

1959: Signs for Rangers.

1962: Moves to Dundee. Won a league championship medal in first season, stayed for six years.

1968: Moves to Falkirk.

1971: Retires after five knee operations.

1974: Joins Motherwell as assistant manager.

1977: Combines duties as part-time manager of Clyde with the role of primary school head teacher and lecturer in primary education at Craigie College.

1986: Joins Scotland's coaching team for 1986 World Cup. Appointed as the full-time assistant national coach to Andy Roxburgh, who had been named as permanent successor to the late Jock Stein.

1989: Coaches Scotland Under-16s to final of world championship.

1992: Coaches Scotland under-21s to semi-finals of the European Championship.

1993: Appointed caretaker-manager of Scotland. Appointed to dual role of national coach and director of football development. Guides nation to Euro 96.

Euro 96: Scotland draw with Netherlands 0-0, lose 2-0 to England and beat Switzerland 1-0, but fail to qualify for latter stages on goal difference.

1997: Qualification for 1998 World Cup ensured by 2-0 win over Latvia at Celtic Park

France 98: Scotland lose to Brazil 2-1, draw 1-1 with Norway, defeat Morocco 3-0, and fail to advance.

1999: Awarded CBE. Loses European qualification play-off to England, 2-1 on aggregate.

2001: Resigned as Scotland manager after 2-1 win over Latvia, Scotland having failed to qualify for 2002 World Cup finals. He had been in charge for 70 games in total, of which Scotland won 32, drew 18 and lost 20. Scotland lost only nine competitive games under Brown.

29 April 2002: Appointed manager of Preston.

He says: "I may not be a Pied Piper figure like Ally MacLeod but I am not an introvert either" - On taking over as Scotland manager, November 1993.

They say: "Craig Brown was no failure. He was the most successful manager in Scottish history," Colin Hendry, Scotland captain, after Brown's resignation.