After my brief talk at Ardossan Accies pre-match lunch last weekend on the general topic of the state of Scottish sport in general and rugby in particular it was a member of the visiting Preston Lodge delegation who asked the question that invited extended consideration.

“Why do you think we manage to stay so optimistic?” he asked, effectively on behalf of the nation during a discussion that had also touched upon the previous night’s football calamity, cricket and our status as the home of golf, after I had drawn comparison between Scotland’s sporting fortunes and those of Ireland in the past 20 years.

Setting aside the political implications in terms of how you turn optimism into belief - which could not, of course, be completely resisted in that context - it truly is a wonder that there we were last weekend nursing our football woes while trying to convince ourselves that we had suffered a good enough defeat to be on course to win rugby’s World Cup.

Two wins, both against Italy, in this year’s previous eight matches had somehow regenerated the belief that the SRU’s infamous strategic target was attainable and, more to the point, that players should risk embarrassing themselves by being encouraged to say so publicly. In that context the sort of extrapolation required to see a narrow defeat in Paris as a milestone on the road to global domination six weeks later was probably not that unreasonable.

Pondering the question I remembered, too, my days editing Scottish Rugby Magazine when we would annually invite the nation’s rugby correspondents to offer their predictions for the forthcoming Five Nations Championship.

When, for the third successive year, one of them said he expected Scotland to “win a Grand Slam” I asked him what on earth he was basing that on.

“If they do win the Grand Slam I just don’t want anyone to be able to turn around and say I didn’t back them,” he reasoned.

Fair enough for a supporter with a typewriter perhaps, albeit slightly more dubious for one who was supposed to be an authoritative voice on the sport, but memory of that explanation offers some insight into why we see things as we do hereabouts, or at least claim to.

In many ways it fits with modern sports coaching methods to be endlessly supportive, hoping that positive reinforcement will eventually generate the belief required to raise performance to the desired and required levels.

As to how that is amplified through the media the novelist Paul Gallico’s magnificent treatise on sports journalism “A Farewell to Sport”, written close to 80 years ago, contains much that remains relevant to this day, not least his explanation of why sports-writing, more than most other branches of journalism, leans too much towards cheer-leading as opposed to proper critical analysis.

“There is only a certain limited audience for the class of sports-writing that has been termed the ‘Oh nuts!’ variety as opposed to the ‘Gee whizz’ type and by far the greater percentage of readers prefers the boost to the knock,” he observed.

“It is human to hero worship provided the hero is human too. The reader wants his too god-like heroes humbled sometimes, not being fond of supermen,but he still wants them heroes. The sports celebrity is the sports-writer’s meal ticket.”

The language may be dated, but the sentiment holds true and while what Gallico is referring to clearly reflects upon the profession globally, when combined with the sporting culture that has been created in Scotland there is a particular problem in terms of repeatedly encouraging the generation of false optimism.

Within the Scottish sports community as a whole it is now construed as somehow negative or even disloyal to acknowledge that our sportspeople are not all world-beaters and to query why.

Consequently, partly drowned out by the noise of parties staged in London in 2012 and Glasgow last year, there has been a failure to examine properly our performance in mainstream sports, in particular when set against the best possible comparator, our fellow Celtic nations.

This is the record, then:

• Since France 1998 Scotland has never reached the finals of a major competition in its national sport; Wales and both Irelands look set for next year’s Euros

• Since winning the 1999 Five Nations Championship Scotland has finished in the top half of the Six Nations table just once; Wales have won three Grand Slams and four Championships and Ireland a Grand Slam and three Championships

• Since Paul Lawrie’s 1999 Open Championship win no Scot has brought a major championship trophy to the “Home of Golf”; Rory McIlroy, Padraig Harrington, Graeme McDowell and Darren Clarke have won nine for the Emerald Isle

• Since 1999 when they first reached the finals, Scotland have still to win a match at cricket’s World Cup; Ireland, who did not reach the finals until 2007, have claimed seven wins and a tie

This surely speaks to systemic competitive failure, rather than merely being attributable to a cyclical blip as many of our administrators would like us to believe.

While acutely aware of Gallico’s warning, then, might I simply suggest that we temper our optimism with some scrutiny of those who are most keen to trade on it?