Malky Mackay takes temporary charge of Scotland team after Gordon Strachan’s departure

Malky Mackay has been placed in interim charge of Scotland for their friendly against the Netherlands on November 9.

The former Cardiff City boss is the Scottish Football Association's performance director and will take the helm while the search begins for a permanent successor to Gordon Strachan.

Strachan's reign as Scotland manager was ended on Thursday, along with assistant Mark McGhee, after the team’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

SFA chief executive Stewart Regan made the Mackay announcement at a media conference where he explained the reasoning for replacing Strachan.

Regan said: "Ultimately we are in a result business. We had a manager in place for five years coming up. He'd had two campaigns.

"When the board met to discuss Gordon's position after the defeats to England and Slovakia, we backed the manager, but we backed the manager on the proviso that we made the play-offs.

"We didn't reach the play-offs and we felt it was time for a new coach to give us a new impetus with emerging talent coming through the Scottish game and give us a real chance to make Euro 2020."

Regan claimed Strachan had given no indication of whether he wanted to continue, but simply asked the SFA board to decide how they wanted to proceed.

Mackay was a controversial appointment as performance director in December last year after being the subject of an 11-month probe into a series of text messages during his time at Cardiff.

And Regan gave little away on whether Mackay would be involved in the recruitment process or a candidate himself.

"Malky's the performance director," he said. "He has got a big job to do and a number of challenges that he is working on at the moment.

"To be fair to Malky he has responded to the board's request. We asked him to take the team in Aberdeen and he was delighted to do so. As far as Malky is concerned, he will then focus on his performance responsibilities.

"We asked him literally in the aftermath of yesterday's decision to lead the team for one match. We haven't discussed anything further as far as the recruitment campaign is concerned."