Exclusive interview: two years into the job, Craig Levein reflects on the highs and lows of being Scotland manager

In a few days he will reach his second anniversary in the job. Scotland aren't at Euro 2012 so he hasn't been the success he hoped to be, and nor is there a mob calling for his head so he isn't a failure either. Levein's reign with Scotland – the biggest job he's ever held, and perhaps ever will – will be decided by how things go when the World Cup qualifiers begin next September. Right now it seems an inordinately long way away. Compared to the daily cut-and-thrust of club management, a Scotland boss has spells of downtime which unfold at the funereal pace of a jail sentence. It'll just be a coincidence that he was clean-shaven when he was appointed by the SFA on December 23, 2009, and now he has a beard.

Recently he switched on the Christmas lights at Kinross. He dusted down a tux to present a prize at the Scottish Sports Awards. These appointments and countless others come the way of a Scotland manager. In work hours he sat through all of his team's Euro 2012 qualifiers again on DVD. He isn't twiddling his thumbs or moving pens around on his desk. He engages constantly with SFA chief executive Stewart Regan, national performance director Mark Wotte and others. Next year he will be more involved in youth coaching. His diary is busy enough. But there's no getting away from it: like any young-ish manager it's hard to deal with the restlessness and frustration of being in charge when you so rarely work with your team or play a game. It's another 11 weeks before players will gather around him for a friendly in Slovenia.

"This job goes from this long flatline, to game time. From the moment a squad is announced it goes shooting up to here [he lifts his hand high]. Not just the media and the public interest but my level of enjoyment in the job: I've got the players. I've got something to do, something productive, something tangible. When you're with the players it's 24 hours a day. You can't sleep really. You've got this going on in your head, that going on, and you're up in the morning planning this and that. There's not a point in the day when you can relax. It's impossible. You can have 10 days of that, or 14 or whatever. Then you come back after a game and you're back down . . . right back down to earth again. And it just totters along. It's a big comedown."

Everyone acknowledges that he is intelligent and comes across well. He is open and pragmatic. Critics describe him as too cautious, and headstrong. There's little doubt that he can be thrawn. Still, he's not above accepting that he makes mistakes. He admits that in his opening months in the job he should have thought about the players' interests rather than his own. "Me not having contact time with the players meant that when I first got them I had a real thirst for getting them on a training ground and working really hard. But you forget that they are training every day. It wasn't them that had been starved of training, it was me. So I did too much training with them. Maybe twice a day or whatever. Once I realised that, I thought, 'wait a minute, I'd better watch what I'm doing here'.

"I wasn't looking at what they needed. I had this head full of stuff and I was thinking 'I need to give them all this information' but they were maybe coming off a hard game at the weekend and needed a couple of days' rest. The last thing they needed was seven team meetings and 14 training sessions. Now I've taken my foot off the gas a bit in that respect."

How else had he changed? Were there other jarring episodes as he adapted? Well, take last year's friendly in Sweden. He thought there would be no harm in making do with a pretty inexperienced team. It was only a friendly, after all. But Scotland were "terrible", his word, in a 3-0 defeat and the backlash from the media and supporters shocked him. It was the last time he took a friendly lightly. Since then Scotland have played seven of them and only failed to beat Brazil in London and the Republic of Ireland in Dublin. "Every time we don't win, it's an opportunity for people to fire bullets."

There was that game in Prague 14 months ago, of course. Scotland trooped out in 4-2-4-0 formation, lost 1-0, and were ridiculed for not having a striker or a clue. It remains a wounding episode which others are wary about bringing up around Levein. If he is still raw about it, he disguises it well. "In some ways it was the best thing that happened for the group. It was a turning point for me. I asked the players to do something that wasn't particularly enjoyable. The easiest thing in the world would have been for them to come out in the papers and say 'that's just a joke', 'what's he doing'. But they didn't.

"The players didn't like it, but they understood. We were trying to nick a draw away from home. I don't think we were in a good enough place then to go to Prague and try to win the game. I would now. I'm methodical and a bit of a plodder about these things." Four days after Prague the best team of them all came to Hampden. Scotland rallied and lost only 3-2 to Spain, but if the world champions had won 5-0 might he have been sacked while feelings were running high? "I always felt I would get two campaigns, whatever happened. The preparation for the last campaign wasn't good enough, partly through my inexperience, partly through not having enough friendly games. That part will be done right before we start in September."

The game in Slovenia on February 29 will be followed by an end-of-May training camp in Austria and a match there, possibly against one of the Euro 2012 finalists. A Hampden friendly in August will be the final fixture before the World Cup starts against Serbia in Glasgow. Croatia, Belgium, Macedonia and Wales are the others who will make Group A "extremely difficult", said Levein. "We could finish top. We could finish bottom. But no other Scottish manager has had to go into a draw from Pot Four."

One day some lucky manager is going to be in charge of the cultural phenomenon of Scotland returning to the World Cup finals. The prize, and the rewards for it, have grown with every failure since qualification for the World Cup in France 13 years ago. "The reason I took this job is because nobody's qualified since 1998.

"I have been in the job for two years. No matter what happens I will do the next campaign. No matter how well we're doing, or if someone comes in for me, I will absolutely go to the end of the campaign. After that I don't know what will happen. Put it this way, someone is only going to come in for me if we're doing exceptionally well. If we do exceptionally well and we qualify then I won't leave. I would maybe never again get the opportunity to go to a World Cup as a manager. It would be the best thing ever."

There have been some very low-level murmurings about how many non Scots-born players he has used, chief among them Phil Bardsley, James Morrison, Kris Commons, Craig Mackail-Smith and Jamie Mackie. "If I cut my own legs off and say 'I'm not going to use anyone who qualifies through their grandparents or whatever' does that increase or decrease our chances of qualifying? It decreases them. If we make it to Brazil will there be some people watching it on their couch saying 'that guy shouldn't be playing for Scotland'? Probably. But the overall majority will be happy. We have to make playing for Scotland such an experience that we don't lose another James McCarthy or Aiden McGeady [who exercised their right to play for the Republic of Ireland instead]. Those are two players who would have enhanced our squad."

Levein borders on the evangelical about the players he does have. He looks at them and sees focused, talented professionals who seem to buy into his vision. But what if they fail again, like all the others over the past seven consecutive campaigns? Wouldn't he get his jotters? "I think that would probably happen. It would be 'ach he's been here for four years let's get someone else in'. There's no doubt that the best time to be the Scotland manager will be after the Brazil campaign. That's when the European Championship finals change from 16 to 24 teams."

That tournament is in France in 2016. Only international mangers ever think that far ahead, in those gentle spells when life just totters along.