McCoist reveals his no air fare scouting policy

Ally McCoist has revealed that he has been reduced to telly scouting in his hunt for new stars.

The summer arrivals of Kenny Miller, Kris Boyd and Darren McGregor suggest that scouting activity at Ibrox is reduced to looking through old team sheets to see if anyone familiar has been freed.

In April 2013 Charles Green removed chief scout Neil Murray leaving the management team to their own devices with no transfer fee’s paid since the £750,000 swoop for David Templeton in August 2012.

While McCoist constantly complains about the lack of a scouting network the club enjoys the second biggest backroom staff in Scotland with Ian Durrant, Kenny McDowall, Jim Stewart, Gordon Durie, Jim Sinclair and Billy Kirkwood all on salaries that Premiership clubs outwith Celtic couldn’t match.

Explaining why he can no longer sign stars like Matt McKay, Juan Ortiz and Mervan Celik McCoist said: “Ian Durrant, Kenny McDowall and myself watch French football, Dutch football, absolutely everything on TV but we can’t go to watch players unless they are in Scotland because of the situation the club is in.

“That is the beauty of having a scouting department. If you have scouts they can go and watch games, they can recommend players and then you can go and look at them. At this moment you are actually just watching games off videos. It is not ideal.

“I met Peter Houston (the former Celtic scout) about four weeks ago at the airport and said: ‘Where have you been?’ He said: ‘Watching six games.’

“Our best opportunity is to watch on the telly. If you have a chief scout and a department, you have the potential to do a Sporting Lisbon.

“You can get a boy at 18, 19 and say: ‘Right, it looks like we are not going to play you for 18 months but we are going to develop you’. That is the ideal world. We are light years away from that.”

Former Hearts defenders Marius Zaluska and Ismael Bouzid are currently on trial at Sevco.