Alex McLeish is heading for a showdown with Celtic over two key players.
Callum McGregor and Ryan Christie have missed their last two club matches and seem certain to sit out the matches against Aberdeen and Dundee.
On the day of the Dundee match McLeish will take his Scotland squad to Kazakhstan with Celtic players expected to feature heavily.
Celtic seem to be planning for McGregor and Christie to back in action for the Glasgow derby on March 31 which is unlikely to involve the scenic route via Kazakhstan and San Marino.
“I’m not expecting Neil Lennon, Stevie Gerrard, Steve Clarke or Craig Levein to do me a favour, I’ll pick the squad and expect everyone to be there,” McLeish told the Daily Record.
“Obviously, the Old Firm game is immediately after our match against San Marino but we’ll look after the players we would do that anyway. I haven’t sat down with the clubs or appealed to them in newspapers to be good to the national manager or Scotland.
“But at this time of the season, we aren’t the only country to have this situation. We will pick the squad and cross the bridge when we come to it. Last year we went to South America and I made a lot of concessions. Every manager wants to look after his own bag but we expect to pick the players and see where it goes from there.
“When we had all the call-offs the last time people were getting paranoid about it and there were three players who might have started for us who called off.
“But they were all genuine call-offs and a lot of that was down to the advice from the performance guys saying, ‘He isn’t going to be able to play’.
“There’s no hiding place now because we have the performance analysts and, when players hit the red lines, that’s when we take them out. You used to say, ‘He looks all right so we’ll just play him’ but we don’t take risks nowadays.”
McGregor picked up his calf injury during Celtic’s 1-0 defeat away to Valencia with Christie pulling a hamstring three days later at home to Motherwell.
This week is the first one of the season that Celtic haven’t had any midweek fixtures or international commitments, before his injury McGregor had played more games this season than any top flight player in Europe.
This will be hurting the ego badly, life goes on post Brendan https://t.co/NmTtu5waiL
— Joe McHugh (@videocelts) March 7, 2019