Mark McGhee revealed his admiration for the Scotland players' attitude to fitness and admits they are in stark contrast to his time as a player.

Gordon Strachan's squad have gathered at their Mar Hall Hotel training base on the outskirts of Glasgow in preparation for the post-season friendly against Qatar at Easter Road on Friday night.

Defender Alan Hutton will join up later in the week after playing for Aston Villa in the FA Cup final defeat to Arsenal at Wembley on Saturday, while the rest of the players fulfilled their last club fixtures at various times last month.

The match against Qatar will act as a warm-up for the crucial Euro 2016 Group D qualifier against the Republic of Ireland in Dublin on Saturday week.

Scotland assistant McGhee was pleased to say that "the players trained yesterday and today and don't look as if they had missed a beat."

He was in light-hearted mood when asked to look back to his time as a striker, referencing his time in Scottish football in the 1980s when he played in three season-ending Scottish Cup finals with Aberdeen and two with Celtic, and how he spent his summers.

He said: "I usually finished on cup final day, I have to say, which was always around the time of my birthday - and then we would have 12 weeks of drinking.

"But nowadays the boys have a totally different mentality.

"Look at the top players, Barcelona have a game on Saturday (Champions League final) and they will be back training and playing again at the beginning of July.

"It is the nature of the modern game. It is almost all-year round and they have to accept that is the case and have a totally different mentality from the time when we finished on the 20th of May and started again on the 13 of July, without doing anything in between.

"It is not like that anymore.

"I can see that (change of mentality), absolutely.