As a prelude to a meeting with Rangers, taking in a play about courage would seem an inspired choice. Alex McLeish and his wife Gill travelled down to London last weekend to recharge the batteries, and take stock of a remarkable beginning to a season which sees Hibs, a struggling First Division side 24 months ago, rammed in between Celtic and Rangers at the top of the Premier League.

They chose to see Nick Whitby’s First World War play To The Green Fields Beyond, which stars the Fife-born actor Dougray Scott, famous for his part in Mission: Impossible II and whose own green fields extend no further than Easter Road, Edinburgh.

Last year, Scott called McLeish "my hero, and Hibs’ saviour". The actor expressed a desire to meet him, and he has, to the extent where the pair are now friends. McLeish, Scott, and professional Cockney bad boy Ray Winstone, star of Quadrophenia and Scum, all hooked up after the performance.

"It was all the usual luvvie stuff," McLeish said, tongue firmly implanted in side of mouth. "All this ‘Moi, Moi’ talk, and kissing on both cheeks."

The Hibs manager couldn’t keep up such precious behaviour all weekend, though. While out shopping on the Brompton Road, he nipped into a pub to watch the England v Germany game, and got talking to a fellow from Wick, who wanted to introduce him to a friend. "This is big Billy McNeill," he said, pointing to McLeish, whose freckle-faced features one would have thought were as distinctive as any in Scottish football. "It fair brought me back to earth," McLeish recalled, with a smile.

You would think the last thing he needs is to be taken down a peg or two.

His team ride high in the Scottish Premier League - having only lost once in the league this season - and yet he resolutely refuses to savour the feeling.

"I’m not going to start boasting," he said yesterday, "and give Rangers motivation." Another show he saw while in London was Notre Dame - "one of these silly, all-singing, all-dancing things" and he didn’t like it. "I knew what was going to happen at the end. It’s a bit like watching Titanic."

McLeish also thinks he knows the closing scenes of this season’s title race.

They won’t include Hibs. "We cannot win the title. It’s not worth discussing the title. Winning against Rangers would just show we have won another home game."

His mate Dougray Scott could tell him about missions that are not always impossible, however.

After all, he rose from the coalfields of Fife, to find fame alongside Tom Cruise. "Aye, he’s like me," said McLeish. "A child of the streets."

It is hard to think of McLeish as this scamp, certainly in the Glasgow streets of his childhood. McLeish’s entire adult life has been spent, save for a spell in Lanarkshire when manager of Motherwell, on the opposite side of the seaboard.

He seems to have become imbued with at least some of the characteristics of an east-coaster. Initially guarded, he spends more time poking a pen top into his lug than he does searching his soul, which is fair enough since he is, after all, a football manager, though one, you suspect, with more substance than most.

He became synonymous with Aberdeen as a player, and as a manager it is at Hibs that the promise shown while in charge at Fir Park is blossoming. His streets are now the streets around Easter Road, and Newington, where he lives.

He says he wants to do something "really worthwhile" at Hibs.

Short of building a new main stand, he has done the next best thing. In two short years he has made the club a proud one again.

"To some fans, it probably hasn’t been quick enough," he ruminated. "I don’t want to be patronising to the people who have supported Hibs all their lives, but I do feel a deep affinity with the club.

"I’m certainly very keen on this city, unlike a lot of Glaswegians. I like the international feel of it. I can understand why foreign players want to come here. The Edinburgh skyline is as beautiful as that of New York."

When he took over at Hibs, in February 1998, he still lived in Lanarkshire, and used the time it took to drive to Edinburgh as a priceless solitude, when he would ponder team selection, and tactics. You remember him saying how he overhauled his side for a game against Celtic somewhere between Harthill and Livingston.

You ask where he now goes for such seclusion, and McLeish explains that he finds it while out walking his dog on the Blackford Hill. "I look at the fabulous view of Edinburgh stretching out below. I take that as inspiration."

He says he talks to his dog about the merits of a 4-4-2 system. You imagine McLeish, wind battering at his freckled cheeks, getting a hit off the autumn sky, talking out loud about his plans to play big Mixu Paatelainen up front alongside David Zitelli, with Russell Latapy in the hole just behind. It’s a nice image, and one which jars against the more well-kent sight of McLeish, ball of gum receiving a pounding in his mouth, and arms flailing in disgust at another suspect refereeing decision.

He refused to comment yesterday on this afternoon’s referee, Kenny Clark. Wise. The last time he urged an official to be "strong" before an encounter with the Old Firm, against Celtic in September, a dubious penalty was awarded against Hibs within the opening quarter of an hour. McLeish has stuck to motivating his own players, something he does well.

Before a fixture against Celtic at the tail end of Hibs’ relegation season, McLeish had his players lining up along the halfway line, impassively staring at their opponents as they huddled together before kick-off.

"I didn’t want them standing around like farts in a trance," said McLeish, and it worked. Hibs came away with a point.

With John Hughes gone, McLeish did fear that much of his side’s soul would depart with him to Ayr. Instead, other leaders have emerged. Stuart Lovell, Mixu Paatelainen, and Franck Sauzee. This season’s party-piece is for every player to pump hands in the seconds leading up to kick-off. It is no theatrical gesture, the manager assures you, even if most see Hibs only playing a walk-on role in the championship race. A win today, however, would render them scene-stealers yet again.

© 2000 The Scotsman