ABOVE the whirring of those dark Satanic mills, somewhere in Burnley, Lancashire, there is the unmistakable sound of a bandwagon gathering momentum.

The hype surrounds a footballer called Scott Arfield, in particular the question of whether he should be granted his maiden call-up to the Scotland squad when Gordon Strachan sits down in the next few days to finalise his selection for the upcoming Euro 2016 qualifiers against Georgia and Poland.

The evidence in support of his case is accumulating with each passing week, and more may crop up today when Burnley visit West Bromwich Albion in a live televised game. In the newly-promoted side's two previous outings in front of the cameras, Arfield smashed a shock opener past Thibaut Courtois in their spirited season-opening 3-1 defeat to a Cesc Fabregas-inspired Chelsea, then helped frustrate Manchester United in a goalless draw in Angel di Maria's debut.

His credentials are plain to see but Arfield himself does not appear to be agitated by the possibility. Not because he wouldn't regard selection for the national team - something, he reckons, no-one else from his hometown of Livingston has achieved - as the crowning achievement of his career. But perhaps because, for all the raw ability which marked him out as a first-team regular at Falkirk at the age of just 17, the midfielder, now 25, appears to many to be an overnight success which has really been a long-time in the making.

Patience has been the watchword for a career which has largely eschewed the headline-grabbing route for the low key, despite being linked with Manchester United as a teenager. Instead, he left Falkirk for lowly Huddersfield with more than 100 first-team appearances to his name and even experienced the ignominy of being released by the Yorkshire club before rebuilding his career as a virtual ever-present in Burnley's promotion season. Strachan likes a footballer who has overcome adversity to succeed at the higher levels of the game but Arfield can hardly be regarded as an unknown quantity to the Scotland scouts. He earned 17 caps at Under-21 level and played in a 3-0 win for Scotland B against Northern Ireland one drab night in Cumbernauld in 2009. Among the other hopefuls looking to catch the eye that night were David Marshall, Steven Naismith and George Boyd, his new team-mate at Turf Moor.

The last time Arfield watched Scotland in person was to see his then Huddersfield team-mate Paul Dixon play in the goalless draw against Serbia. While the rest of his peer group were on the flight to Dortmund for the heroic but ultimately unrewarding 2-1 defeat to world champions Germany, like any other exiled Scot, Arfield hooked up with an old pal nearby and cheered on the team in front of the television.

"It has always been an ambition for me to play for my country," Arfield told the Sunday Herald. "I have had a few people telling me I should be [in the squad], but I am not buying into that. There are only two people's opinions that matter, those of the gaffer here [Sean Dyche] and the Scotland manager. It doesn't matter what I say or what anyone else says.

"I have played at Under-21 level and B level but it is not the be all and end all. I am not going to hang my hat on it. I've never met Gordon Strachan and I don't know if I have been in his thoughts or not. If he thinks I can enhance the squad in any way then I would be more than delighted to turn up and play a part. But the main thing is staying in the Burnley first XI."

Arfield - who will come up against Scotland squad regulars James Morrison and Graham Dorrans today - is largely utilised in a wide role for his club and knows vacancies in midfield for the national team rarely show up. "We have a settled squad and the midfield is probably the hardest area to break into," he said. "They went to Germany and played ever so well for the best part of 70 minutes. To lose such a soft goal after working so hard was a blow, but the manager has instilled the belief back into the country and got the fans behind them again which can only be a good thing."

The limelight of the Barclays Premier League is all-pervasive - for good and for ill. Burnley go into today's match on the back of three consecutive goalless draws but just weeks after scoring that supreme effort against Chelsea, Arfield cost his side the chance to claim all three points at Crystal Palace by placing a late penalty too close to goalkeeper Julian Speroni.

"Three clean sheets in a row in the Premier League is almost unheard of," Arfield said. "But we are not naive. We know that draws aren't going to be good enough, we need to get those wins. As for the penalty, if you are going to hit them, you have to live with the consequences. I caught it sweet enough but for the goalkeeper it was nearly a perfect height. He went with the other hand to make it look a bit more spectacular!"

Arfield has never been afraid of hard graft. He is the kind of character who used to go road running or play five-a-sides with his pals after training, but he freely admits that football became a chore, rather than a labour love, towards the end of his period at Huddersfield.

"I took for granted how many games I played in Scotland," he said. "When I moved down here at 20 I thought everyone had played that many matches, but then you see all these people stuck on benches. I was training well but it always seemed no matter what you did, there was a settled team and you couldn't really get involved. Your heart falls out of it when it is like that. I was happy to get out and I think they were just as happy to get rid of me."

Thankfully, in the form of Dyche, Arfield appears to have encountered a kindred spirit. One of the most highly-rated young managers in the game, the 43-year-old is happy to indulge the more forward-thinking elements of the player's game, knowing his work for the team is an absolute given.

Arfield maintains more interests away from the game than your average footballer. He has previously been in a band with his brother, and currently has a stake in a T-shirt business, Boston and Lynchpin, with his former Falkirk team-mate Sean Lynch. Thoughts of Falkirk are also never far away, not least with old manager John Hughes riding high in the SPFL Premiership with Inverness Caledonian Thistle. Arfield's Burnley shirt number, 37, is the same as that worn by Craig Gowans, his fellow Falkirk trainee who tragically died in 2005 when the metal goalpost he was carrying at a training session struck an overhead power line.

"To be fair I was always No 16 at Falkirk and Huddersfield so at first I wanted to keep that," Arfield said. "But most of the boys who were involved in Craig's era at Falkirk wanted to put something back and it was only fitting to carry on his legacy. It was such a horrific thing to happen to an amazing young man who had all the ability in the world. It is nice to show we are still thinking about him in some way. You never know what he could have gone on to achieve."

Whether or not his Scotland call finally arrives this week, further achievements are surely in the pipeline for Arfield. "West Brom away isn't any bigger or smaller than Chelsea at home," he said. "Once you have played in the Premier League you don't want to just play once, you want to play every week. I guess Scotland would be the same. It is something I am striving for."