By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
Three years ago, Josh McPake didn't have a club. Twenty months ago, he was in the shop window and, by his own camp's account, still no one wanted him. This week, he's in his first Scotland camp — a call-up earned the hard way, after a start to life at Hearts that's turned heads across the country.
It's the kind of story that gets told in locker rooms more than boardrooms: the player who gets cut loose, keeps working, and forces his way back in through form alone. McPake's path wasn't linear or tidy. It included stretches on the outside looking in, the particular indignity of being available and still unwanted, before Hearts gave him a platform and he made the most of it.
Now Steve Clarke's Scotland squad has a place for him, and the winger who couldn't get a phone call twenty months ago is training alongside the country's best. There's no shortcut in a story like this — just a player who didn't disappear when the game seemed to have moved on without him.
Final score's the last thing that mattered here.
— Compiled from reporting by BBC Sport Scotland.
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