Imagine one day, you are the Rangers manager, standing amid the thrall of a pulsating Celtic Park, where 7000 of your supporters are going wild after a last-minute equaliser against your greatest rivals. Then imagine the next day, that rush is replaced by the comparative banality of overseeing the club’s under-20s in front of a handful of spectators at the training ground, and realising that this is where you will be staying, with the colour and noise of that moment in the spotlight fading into the distance.

Graeme Murty has lived through that scenario once, after Pedro Caixinha was chosen to take charge of Rangers on a permanent basis following Murty’s temporary holding of the reins. Now, after Caixinha's exit, Murty is back in his happy place. For how long though, only the Rangers board may know, and even they may not be certain.

Having admitted he would like to put himself forward for the position on a permanent basis, Murty has much to contemplate in the meantime. And near the forefront of his thoughts has been the question of whether he could handle that come-down once more, stepping back to his previous day-job overseeing the development squad, or whether he would look to spread his wings to make his name in frontline management elsewhere.

“I’ve been thinking about that one for a while,” Murty admitted, adding after a pause: “Not at the moment. At the moment, I’m in possibly the best learning environment that I’ve been in, personally and professionally, so that wouldn’t be something I would be thinking about.

“If the board ask someone else to come in, and I was to go back to the 20s, I wouldn’t think about that at the moment, no.

“At this moment in time I have far too much on my plate prepping for this week, but were I to go back to the 20s, I have a fantastic project there that I can get my teeth into.

“But this learning experience and this learning environment, at this moment, is too good to turn down.”

Murty's repeated use of, or a variation of the phrase "at the moment" was significant for he is a man of ambition. But while giving up the manager’s office at Ibrox would be hard enough for him, giving up the club altogether is another matter.

“The last time I went from a full Parkhead with all the colour and the noise to one man and a dog here at the training ground for a training game, so it was very, very stark,” he said. “But I think that any club would be hard-pushed to match this one in terms of emotion and history, and just the general matchday experience, because it is so spectacular.”

Rangers midfielder Ryan Jack is another stepping up a level to improving one’s self with his inclusion in the Scotland squad.

Murty is in no doubt the recognition is deserved, and he hopes the experience will benefit both the player and his club too.

“I’m delighted for him,” Murty said. “Since I’ve watched him work he’s been a fantastic professional. He’s been very open, he’s been very vocal as well, he’s got an opinion.

“This is the next logical step in his career progression, to go and be fantastic for the national team.

“Hopefully he enjoys the experience, learns from it, and he’ll come back a much more confident player who is capable of going on to bigger and better things. There’s that cross-pollination of ideas. It can just be a different kind of touch, a different way of seeing the game, different communication skills, but it definitely is an enhancement of what is already there.

“I think he is clever enough to go and absorb those lessons, then bring them back and deploy them here on a daily basis, and that’s his challenge.”

There has been some talk that Jack will be deployed as a right-back in the friendly fixture against The Netherlands back on his old stamping ground of Pittodrie on Thursday night, and as a former Scotland right-back himself, Murty believes he has the tools and the adaptability to cope with the shift in position.

“I think he’s a clever footballer and he has a number of outstanding weapons that he can deploy,” he said. “Whoever uses him, what they’ll get is great effort, great intensity, great concentration, and more than anything I think he is someone you can give tactical instructions to and see it deployed at a high level.

“That’s something that impressed me from the get-go, that you can give him instructions regardless of where he is on the pitch, and he will go and implement that well.”

Murty doesn’t come across as someone who would suffer fools gladly, but he certainly isn’t a practitioner of the "my way or the highway" school of management either. His philosophy is that the players are worth listening to, and so far, it is a philosophy that the Rangers squad have bought into.

“I’ve had chats with all of the players, but it’s about building relationships and making sure they’re comfortable with me,” he said.

“It’s not about me going in and dictating to international class footballers, it’s about it being two-way. They will have opinions, they will see things differently on a football pitch to how I will, and they have to say ‘actually Gaffer, Boss, Murts’, whatever they want to call me, ‘I’d like to do it that way.’

“You have to listen to that experience, you have to listen to the talent and they have to feel as if they have a voice and that I will listen.

“It will be an ongoing process as it is with any group of footballers when it’s new. But hopefully it is something they can use to get their point across, so we can all move forward.”