Former Scotland boss Craig Brown has agreed with SFA performance director Malky Mackay’s assessment of young modern-day players, saying that they are too ‘mollycoddled’.

The 76-year-old has seen his fair share of methods used to keep young players on the straight and narrow, but says that most wouldn’t be tolerated these days.

Consequently, he feels that young professionals have lost their discipline, and the standard of player coming through has deteriorated as a result.

“It used to be the youth players or under-21 players had to sweep out the stand as a punishment if they lost a game,” Brown said.

“Or maybe they had to clean the manager’s car. But you couldn’t get away with that now.

“Jim McLean had the cleanest car in Britain as he was the hardest manager in the world.

“Now if you asked kids to sweep a stand or clean a car the union would be right on to you. They wouldn’t tolerate that. They would say you were bullying young boys.”

Brown concedes that players these days have far more distractions than they did in his day that keep them away from doing extra work on their fitness or technique.

As a coach, Brown always tried to instil a work ethic in younger players, and he hopes that Mackay can help bring back a similar attitude in the youth of today.

“I think Malky has a point that young players are sitting on their iPads and laptops too much,” he said.

“When we had the under-16s before the World Cup here we took them to the coaching course at Largs as runners. And that was compulsory.

“When the guys were doing their coaching session the kids would do the drills for them, guys like Paul Dickov and Neil Murray. They were the guinea pigs.

“I would go into their room at night and tell them to get on the floor and give me 50 sit-ups. They just got into the habit of doing the hard work.

“Malky has this idea that fitness or dedication should be better and he’s got a point.

“I would say there are more distractions now for the younger players than they used to be. We used to go out and play football, we didn’t have laptops or computers.

“Young kids now can play football on these things without ever kicking a ball. We mollycoddle the kids a wee bit.

"Kenny Dalglish wasn't coached or trained, he just had the natural ability and he went out and played with Cumbernauld. There wasn't a magic procedure that produced Dalglish, Jimmy Johnstone and Jim Baxter, they just had the natural ability and a lot of opportunity to play - and no distractions."