Eight years? Has it really only been eight years? At long last, the final curtain has fallen on the Stewart Regan reign of infamy as chief executive of the Scottish Football Association, and when examining his record from his time in office, it is tempting to surmise that the crooked hook has hauled him off the Scottish football stage not a moment too soon.

The former chief executive of Yorkshire County Cricket Club limped on as the figurehead of our national game’s governing body for far too long.

In some ways, it is hard not to feel a measure of sympathy for a man who was clearly in the wrong movie from the beginning. But in other ways, when you factor in his litany of failures and the fact he trousered around £300,000 a year in the process, not so much.

Here, we take a look back at some of the key moments that finally brought an end to Stewart Regan’s reign as SFA chief executive yesterday.

Way back in those heady days of 2010, Regan said that the SFA made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Yesterday, it seems, they made him another one.

No sooner was Regan in the door though than he faced the first test of his leadership. Referees, fed up with a perceived lack of protection from the SFA over criticism from clubs, went on strike. For the first time since 1905, a referee from outwith Scotland officiated a Scottish domestic game, with Regan drafting in replacements from all over Europe. By the time the whole sorry affair had been brought to a conclusion, Regan was even having to fend off allegations that he had to lie to the foreign officials over the reason for the strike just to get them here. An inauspicious start.

His next major test came with the financial collapse of Rangers into liquidation. His claim that there would be ‘social unrest’ should Rangers disappear from the Scottish game were met with incredulity, and he then played a central role in the infamous ‘five-way agreement’ to shoehorn the Ibrox club into what was then the First Division in return for the stripping of titles. Neither scenario came to pass, and a sour feeling has lingered around Regan’s handling of the whole affair ever since.

Loyalty can of course be an admirable quality, but in Regan’s case, his insistence in standing by managers came back to haunt him.

He didn’t appoint Craig Levein as national coach, but stuck by him for three miserable years until finally parting ways with the now Hearts boss late in 2012. The appointment of Gordon Strachan meant that he had his own man, and would live and by his success in finally getting Scotland to a major championships.

Alas, it proved beyond him not once, but twice, and Regan’s decision to stand by his man despite the failure to qualify for Euro 2016 was another misjudgment. The fact that the decision seemed to be swung by the Tartan Army singing Strachan’s name in Faro after a win over Gibraltar was simply bizarre.

The appointment of Malky Mackay as SFA performance director after the departure of Brian McClair was another decision that attracted plenty of flak, and Regan was forced to defend his man at a cringe-inducing unveiling over his history of racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic text messages.

In another apparent show of faith to Mackay, he was made interim manager of the national side for November’s friendly against The Netherlands, only for Regan to pull the rug from under him by telling the press that he wasn’t in the running for the permanent role before he had informed Mackay himself.

Despite all of this, Regan was still standing until three key failures in recent times brought about the end of his reign; the lengthy and ultimately doomed courtship of Michael O’Neill, the lack of a main sponsor beyond the World Cup this summer to replace Vauxhall, and the decision to take the national team to South America at the end of the season for friendlies against Peru and Mexico.

Even for the SFA, these ignominies were too much to bear, and it was finally exit stage left for Regan.