GORDON Scott, the St Mirren chairman, has revealed the Paisley club will appoint a technical director to oversee football matters following the ill-fated 77 day reign of Alan Stubbs as manager.

Scott believes that Stubbs could have benefited from working alongside a technical director when he took over from Jack Ross during the summer.

But the successful businessman, who last week appointed Oran Kearney as Stubbs’s successor, stressed the Ladbrokes Championship champions would learn from the experience.

“Because of what’s happened this season we’ve looked again at how we run things and we’re planning to bring in a technical director, who will be a constant presence at the club,” he said.

“When Jack went to Sunderland he left a big hole and we had a new guy coming in and signing a lot of players and relying on other people to tell him how good they were.

“However, if we have someone in here full-time, working with the manager to identify players further ahead, then that should help.

“It’s something we’ve just started looking at and it might happen quickly or it could take time – it’s important to get Oran settled in first and then we’ll look at that more closely.”

Scott, who bought a 51 per cent stake in St Mirren for £700,000 two years ago, admitted he was still mystified by why Stubbs, who won the William Hill Scottish Cup with Hibernian, struggled.

He suggested, however, that making too many changes to the side that had won the second tier title so convincingly may have been an issue.

“I’ve absolutely no idea,” he said. “He had the cv, the experience, he wanted to build his own team. Part of the problem was maybe that he should have stuck with the core of the promotion-winning team and then added to it rather than just knocking everything away to start afresh.”

Scott believes that Kearney, who led Coleraine to the Irish Cup last season, is very much in the mould of Ross, who moved on to take over at Sunderland after leading St Mirren into the top flight.

“I think you can see already that Oran has lifted the dressing room,” he said. “His first day was really good and we could see that the camaraderie was still there.

“Oran reminds me of Jack in many ways, most definitely. If you look at the template we had with Jack, he was someone who was good at handling people. I’m not saying Alan wasn’t but we’re back to looking at a hungry young manager who’s good at dealing with players.

“We were close to going with Oran in the summer but if we had brought him in and it hadn’t worked out then we’d have been wondering, three months down the line, why we hadn’t gone with Alan Stubbs, who had the a great cv and perfect references.

“It would’ve been very hard to explain why we hadn’t given Alan the job, whereas Oran seemed like a bit of a risk. I don’t feel it’s as big a risk now, though.

“Honestly, everyone in football we spoke to told us Alan would be a great appointment and the fans seemed happy with him too.

“He came across really well at the interview and had no issues with the budget he had to work with – in fact, he referred to his time at Hibs, where he’d brought players in on similar wages to what we were offering. Everything he said seemed right to us at the time.”

Scott admitted that St Mirren, who are in second bottom spot in the Premiership after losing three of their first four league games, would need to strengthen if Kearney is to be successful.

"It would be good if we could add a wee bit of experience," he said. "That is the issue we have always had - it is a very, very young team. Stephen McGinn is probably our most experienced player at 28-years-old.

"There is no experience at the back. We need a bit of experience there. If we can get some-body who is available just now it would help."