Inside Steve Kean's life after Hibs as Scot thriving in far-flung adventure after receiving a 'blank piece of paper'

Steve Kean's passport is more like a map of the world. Which perhaps explains why the Cumbernauld-born coach, who started as a Celtic academy kid, currently finds himself in Georgia.

Not the American version, home to Atlanta and Augusta. That would be too simplistic for a man who has never been afraid to take a chance. No, Kean finds himself in Kutaisi, Georgia’s second biggest city, some 300km west of Tbilisi, where Steve Clarke will take his Scotland team on Thursday.

The Scot won’t be there to cheer them on. He’s taking advantage of the international break to visit his son in Edinburgh, back at the house he bought during his hugely successful tenure as academy director at Hibs – a secure post he left to become manager of Torpedo Kutaisi six months ago. Kean, 56, has managed Blackburn in the Premier League and coached and played in Australia, Brunei, Spain, Portugal and Greece.

That was before an obvious wanderlust dragged him away from the youth set-up at Hibs, where his reputation for developing young talent has seen players such as Rory Whittaker and Josh Landers make first-team debuts at 16 this term. Which makes the first question to Kean an obvious one. Why?

He said: “It was going to take something special to leave Hibs because I loved my time there. We had a really good group of young players coming through and it was nice to see another couple of them featuring for the first team against St Mirren in midweek. But this is a country that I hadn’t worked in and I’ve always enjoyed new challenges.

“That, and the chance to take the team into Europe were big factors. I just thought, ‘why not?’ I was getting back into a first-team environment playing in Europe. We beat Sarajevo and Aktobe from Kazakhstan and we were