Pleased as he’ll be to see the former Scotland man back, however, Alex is determined to take a softly-softly approach with him.

“It’s been a while now since Colin has played and he won’t get the whole 90 minutes tonight, so, right now, I’m not thinking in terms of when he’ll be back in the first team,” he said.

“First thing is to see how he feels after tonight, then we’ll leave it for a few days to see if he suffers any reaction.

“Next week, I’ll sit down with him and have a chat about how he feels and we will take things from there, but the big thing for me is having him back permanently and, if that means leaving him on the sidelines for another week or two, then that’s what will happen.”

“We have a few foreign players and, especially with the younger ones, I see no harm in them going home for a few days,” said the manager. “Hopefully, they will come back eager to get going again.”