Graham Alexander has backed Liam Kelly for a Scotland call-up as he labelled the goalkeeper as a 'top professional.'
Steve Clarke is set to name his squad for the upcoming World Cup qualifiers against Denmark, Moldova and Austria next week.
The 57-year-old watched Kelly, and fellow candidate Zander Clark, in Motherwell's 1-1 draw with St Johnstone at McDiarmid Park a fortnight ago.
Kelly has been outstanding since arriving at Fir Park in January and Alexander believes the 25-year-old is good enough to represent his country.
“Of course,” Alexander replied when asked if he’d back a Scotland call-up for Liam Kelly. “I understand the difficulties that Steve Clarke has.
“He has more than 23 good players available to pick from. I don’t want to put any undue pressure on him as he knows his job, his squad and his players.
“But certainly Liam Kelly has shown, since my time coming here in January, that he’s certainly capable of playing at that level.
“We will see what comes this week but fingers crossed.
"We speak to Liam a lot and part of his decision making in coming back to Scotland was to try to realise his ambition of being in the Scotland squad.
“If it doesn’t happen this time then I know for a fact that he’ll keep training and playing as well as he can because he’s a top professional. We are delighted to have him with us.”
Motherwell travel to Livingston tomorrow in search of their first Premiership win of the season.
Despite restrictions easing, it's been a complicated pre-season for Scottish clubs as they contend with playing football amidst a pandemic.
'Well boss Alexander admits it's been a challenging period with players returning from injury and Covid - things that he's never experienced before.
He said: "I don’t want to overegg the scenario that we’ve been through because I’m sure it’s been difficult for a lot of managers.
“But without a shadow of a doubt we’ve had a fragmented pre-season period together. Quite a few lads are coming back to playing from a long time out or not playing for their previous club.
“That takes time to get them up to speed. Ideally, in a beautiful world we’d have six to ten friendlies to get them up to speed before competitive action but that’s not the scenario.
“We’ve had to throw them in straight away because we know that they’re good players.
"We know the performances will improve but I still feel that the performances in the last three games have been close to winning games.
“I don’t understand the process of coming back after a year injury because it didn’t happen to me as a player.
“I don’t understand how you get back to full fitness after Covid because I’ve never had that.
There’s loads of scenarios that my players are going through that I don’t fully understand but I need to give them the time and patience to overcome that.
“I know there are loads of good players in our squad.”
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