Tam Scobbie, the young Falkirk defender, last night set his sights on breaking into George Burley's Scotland squad after the club rewarded his consistent form with a new five-year contract.
The 19-year-old has already made 50 appearances for his local side since breaking through from their academy ranks and has also become a regular performer for the Scotland Under-21 side.
Ahead of tonight's home meeting with Hibernian, where a win would take Falkirk to fifth spot in the league, Scobbie said: "I hear Burley talk about Christophe Berra and Steven Fletcher, who are excellent players and are doing fantastic in the SPL every week.
"If I can keep working hard, who knows? He might make me a full international."
John Hughes, the man who has overseen Scobbie's development, is looking forward to going head-to-head with Mixu Paatelainen, his former Hibs team-mate, in the match at Westfield stadium.
He said: "Mixu is a great lad, I can't speak highly enough of the guy. He's astute in his football philosophy as well. He seems to favour the eye-catching players, like Merouane Zemmama, Dean Shiels, John Rankin, Fletcher."
Zemmama, like Scobbie, holds international aspirations. The 24-year-old playmaker has not been involved with the Moroccan national team since his acrimonious transfer from Raja Casablanca to Easter Road in the summer of 2006.
He said: "The problem has finished with Casablanca, so it is just a problem with the federation and hopefully they will sort it out.
"I hope that will be done in the next two or three months so I can play in the qualifiers for the World Cup."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article