However, there is a big difference between scoring a winning goal for your country at Hampden and enduring growing frustration over the lack of first-team opportunities offered by your club side. "It will be good to see them again, " said Beattie as he prepared to fly to Tbilisi with the Scotland squad for Wednesday's penultimate Euro 2008 qualifier. The 23-yearold understandably has Georgia on his mind.

Back in March he came off the bench to score a late winner against Klaus Toppmoller's side. It was his first international goal in Alex McLeish's first game in charge. This time Beattie will travel to face Georgia as a West Brom player; part of a now sizeable group of Scottish forwards plying their trade in the English Midlands.

Shaun Maloney, Kenny Miller and Garry O'Connor all play in the same geographical patch. Beattie now calls Solihull home and he clearly couldn't be happier working under Tony Mowbray; the manager who once tried to sign him for Hibernian but eventually landed his man this summer as West Brom prepared for the campaign they hope will return them to the Premier League.

"The manager is fantastic, absolutely brilliant. Everything is positive, everything is about encouragement. He is not interested in shouting at you and putting you down, he is just fantastic to work for.

You know you can go and express yourself and you can go and talk to him because he is very approachable. It is a fantastic atmosphere to work in, " enthused Beattie.

Getting him to talk about his relationship with Gordon Strachan does not elicit anything like as fulsome a response.

Beattie wants to leave the past where it is, but it is hard not to read meaning into what he doesn't say. And the fact he insists he does not have a single regret about leaving Celtic; a club he had been with for seven years. "The move was my choice. I had a conversation with the manager and decided to make the move. It wasn't difficult at all. I'd been thinking about it for too many months to be perfectly honest. I'd more or less made my mind up, " he revealed.

"He [Strachan] said he wanted to keep players who could help his squad. I obviously took a wee bit out of that, but you turn that coin over and there is another 75 per cent on the other side. I would rather keep what me and the manager spoke about kind of quiet. There are no hard feelings or anything like that and he understood what I was saying to him."

Beattie made 20 appearances for Celtic last season. Two months into the new campaign, following his �1.25m move to the Hawthorns, he has already made 12 for his new club. Given the length of the Championship season, he expects the workload to be ferocious. But he welcomes that.

"There are a hell of a lot of games in this league. There are 46 league games, we've already played three in the Carling Cup, the FA Cup has not even started and if you take into account internationals you could play 65 games a season. That's an awful lot of games, but that is why I went to West Brom . . . to play football. You'll never hear me complaining about games every few days!

"It's great to have a good run of games.

It is just great to be playing and to feel part of the actual team and thinking 'I need to go out and do something for my mates here' rather than being on the bench every week waiting for the call with 10 minutes to go. That can be very frustrating because then you get the call and you are going mad to try and impress and sometimes that can have an adverse affect."

It is easy to understand his sentiments.

No one could underestimate the difficulty of breaking into the first team with the likes of Henrik Larsson, Chris Sutton, John Hartson and Craig Bellamy in the way, but Beattie had obviously reached a point where he felt he deserved more of a chance than he was getting under Strachan.

"I'd been at Celtic since I was 16 and I'd seen it happen to boys in the past. Maybe they should have left a wee bit sooner than they possibly did. I wasn't affected by anything other than a football decision. It wasn't about the size of the club, or European football or anything else other than making a career choice, " he explained.

The truth is Beattie really didn't have to agonise about leaving the Scottish champions. He knew it was time, and what heartache there might have been concerned the day-to-day frustrations of not playing a more meaningful role in firstteam affairs.

"I really didn't have the agonising part.

Well maybe only when I couldn't believe I wasn't playing. So you work hard all the next week to see what happens and then you come on and do well and still you are not playing the next week. It just all adds up and you get to the point when you think it is time to look elsewhere."

The elsewhere, once he had spoken to Mowbray, was only ever going to be one club. West Brom's impressive squad includes Kevin Phillips, a former European Golden Boot winner, and the depth of forward power led to John Hartson being loaned out to Norwich City last week after the veteran Welshman had slipped to around seventh-choice striker under Mowbray.

The pressure, like for so many in the division, is to climb out of the Championship and back into England's lucrative top flight. Beattie insists the greatest pressure doesn't come from the boardroom or the fans, but from the players themselves.

"The boys experienced disappointment last year when they looked like one of the top sides in the league, but other teams ground out more results. I think we are putting a fair bit of pressure on ourselves because we need to get into the Premiership . . . that is where this club should be.

That is what I feel and I know the management feel that too."

He sounds at home already, both with his new life in Solihull and the club he has joined. "At least now I am fully part of a squad that is trying to achieve something, " he observed pointedly.

For Beattie, at least, it seems there is no substitute for knowing that your manager believes you have a significant role to play.