The world seems to be liberally sprinkled with things whose sole purpose appears to be to make me feel old, it is true. But here’s a caker. There is now a manager in the Scottish Premiership who was born after Mexico ’86. A manager. It was bad enough when players started to emerge who were still gestating when Gordon Strachan tried to lowp a Camel, but a manager? Crivvens.

Mexico ’86 is a yardstick of significance as far as I am concerned, because it is the first football tournament I can actually remember. Aberdeen’s rout of Hearts under the glorious May sunshine in the 1986 Scottish Cup Final was the first game I ever watched from start to finish and, though had I realised that that was pretty much as good as it was ever going to be for a Dons fan joining the bandwagon at that precise moment I perhaps might have been tempted to ask Dad to switch over to Grampian and watch Airwolf instead, I was instantly hooked. By the time the World Cup rolled around at the end of that month I was ready to go and uncontainably excited.

Primed for adventure and the promise of the occasional late night; armed with my little red Ladybird book of World Cup ’86 and the obligatory Panini album. In a perfect example of unconscious conditioning, it did not strike my young self as odd that the Iraqis and Algerians had to share stickers while the big guns of soccer’s top nations were each granted one all of their own: as Scots we were used to that, our clubs getting the single-page treatment at the rear of Panini’s domestic books. An early lesson that the world judges your worth on where you come from. In hindsight, what a wonderful thing that the half-sticker Moroccans finished up topping a group containing the double-spread renown of England, Poland and Portugal: in the realm of stickers it would take only one Portuguese player to completely cover Krimau and Abderrazak Khairi, but all eleven of them couldn’t do it on the pitch.

I remember being awed by the Danish team which obliterated everyone in Scotland’s group – a team of seemingly completely irresistible superhumans, swatting aside everyone with an unbeatable combination of pace, power and weirdly awesome kits – then utterly baffled at the 5-1 trouncing they took from Spain. How can that happen? How can a team you admire so much lose by a massive number like that? Get used to it, kid.

I remember the gravity-defying scissors kick of Manuel Negrete and the staggering goals of the frighteningly-proportioned Brazilian right-back Josimar, who must surely, I presumed, have been the greatest footballer who ever lived. Most of all I remember thinking that football was fantastic, and that it couldn’t possibly get any better than this.

Of course, it never did. By Italia ’90 football had all but disappeared into a dungheap of diving and passbacks, leaving the towering glory of Mexico ’86 a fondly held memory for all who witnessed it. So it will be interesting to see how the Premiership’s first ever child of the post-Mexico age, Ian Cathro – for it is he – approaches his new role in our national game. He is known to be very systematic and thorough (neither words which set the pulse racing, admittedly) and seeks to maximise every second of every player in every game, but, not having lived through the innocent brilliance of the scintillating summer of ’86, does that mean he would have cautioned Vasily Rats not to hit it from there or advised Peter Reid to take Maradona out at halfway? Does the younger man see football through more calculating modern eyes?

We shall see. With the obvious disclaimers, good luck to him. He certainly represents something different in a game all too quick to make predictable, retread managerial appointments.