IT is 20 long years since a Scottish national team qualified for the World Cup finals and if Shelley Kerr had been told back then that she might be the person to stop the rot, she would have found it hard to believe.

In 1998 the former internationalist was taking a break from the game having had a baby two years earlier. She returned to football and re-established herself in the national team but few could have predicted quite how pivotal a role she would play in trying to return Scotland to the World Cup stage.

Kerr is almost six months into her role as manager of the women’s national team. With two games played in their 2019 World Cup qualifying group, Scotland have the maximum six points after victories over Belarus and Albania with the squad continuing the form that saw them qualify for their first major championship, Euro 2017. Hope is high.

“I’m absolutely loving it,” she said. “I’ve been involved with football for a long time and so I know that you’ve got to take the good with the bad and my goodness, I’ve had a lot of that.

“We’ll take the victories and we’ll take the good performances but I think the key thing is that we don’t get too far ahead of ourselves because it’s a long campaign and there’s no doubt that there’ll be ups and downs for us. But the more challenging environments you’ve been in, the more it helps you because you’re capable of dealing with things that bit better.”

The former Arsenal Ladies head coach is a firm believer that the mental side of the game is just as important as the physical.

“What separates an average player from the very best players is making the right decisions,” she said. “How do you make the right decisions? It’s by creating that environment in training, knowing what works for you and learning from your mistakes. Opponents go through the same preparation so it comes down to who has the edge on the day, who can cope with the pressure and who can make the right decisions under pressure. You can make decisions on the training pitch but it’s when it really matters that it counts and our job as coaches is to create as close to that match environment in training as possible.”

Kerr, whose three-year stint at the University of Stirling saw her become the UK’s first female coach of a men’s professional football team, wants her players to know she is confident they can cope with whatever they face.

“It’s about making the players understand that they’re trusted to perform and we were really keen on creating that environment early on. We made five changes from the first game to the second of me being in charge – I don’t think that’s ever happened before, certainly not in my time being around the game and that’s a sign to the players that they’re all trusted to do a job. And it’s reinforcing that we need a full squad of players to get through this campaign,” said Kerr, who team have a number of friendly games, starting this month in Spain where they will face Norway and Russia, before April’s qualifiers against Switzerland and Poland.