DOWN at the o2 this week. Far more enjoyable than the 0-3 was last Friday.

One of the more bizarre aspects of a hysterical week leading up to Scotland's demoralising World Cup clash with the Auld Enemy was the desperate clamour for Andy Murray to attend the match. Or if not that, couldn't he just visit the team hotel on the morning of the game, and swish his racquet above their heads as the squad sat at breakfast to see if some of his magic dust might wear off?

As much of a morale boost as it might have been to see Scotland's greatest ever sports person in the flesh, Gordon Strachan rightly saw through it. Good newspaper line or not, Murray is not in fact blessed with magical powers and basing your entire strategy on the random visit of a tennis player to team HQ on the eve of the game seems like desperation.

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The logical conclusion of such thinking is to give Rod Stewart the credit for Celtic's great European nights or buying into the theory that Uri Geller did in fact mysteriously move the ball off its spot as Gary McAllister ran up to hit it at Euro 96. Perhaps the SFA should forget about their search for a new performance director and employ a witch doctor instead.

Anyway, the point is that Scottish football has to work harder than that if it is serious about wanting some of Murray's magic dust to rub off on it. And that means interrogating precisely what factors which have allowed this 29-year-old from Dunblane to become so phenomenally successful and implementing them in the national sport. The success of Murray and his brother Jamie shows that it IS possible to come from Scotland and become the best in the world, it just takes some doing. And like the LTA before them, the SFA and their chief executive Stewart Regan deserve to get it in the neck until they find a way to facilitate more footballing success.

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It was interesting this week to hear Murray say that, until he moved out to the Sanchez-Casal Academy in Barcelona in his early years, he was essentially doing "three, three-and-a-half, four hours a week" on tennis in fairly basic facilities in Dunblane and Bridge of Allan. This, I would wager, is approximately the same amount of time he was devoting to his boys' club football, and is precisely the kind of grounding in sport that many of our most promising young sports people and athletes are going through right now.

What happened next, though, was crucial. When a decision was eventually taken to pursue one sport or another - even if its genesis was a nasty ankle problem picked up in a football match which cost him the chance to compete in a prestigious tennis tournament - Andy went all-in. He chose tennis, and while that sport ran in the family anyway, suddenly he was over in Spain, living and breathing it, doing more than those "three or four hours" every single day.

He, and his parents, took personal responsibility for his career, rather than leaving it in the hands of some coach or other. That would be a decent place for each and every football player in Scotland right now, at all ages and stages of the system, to start: take responsibility for your own self-improvement and use the work demanded by your club coaches - whether at boys' club, academy, amateur, professional or international level - as a starting point rather than an end.

I dare say that taking a page from the Murrays book and getting out of Scottish culture as possible would help too, even if not every parent will have the wherewithal to make that happen. Alex Smith was correct this week when he identified that managers have to be braver when it comes to blooding young players and clubs must be encouraged or forced to be less self-interested, while generally the culture of Scottish football has to be made a less brutal, abusive and violent place for our young people to develop in.

Everything should be on the table. Central contracts, national academies, and get quotas back on the agenda in these post-Brexit times. If not, the SFA may just find one day that many of our most promising young sports stars really do take a page out of Andy Murray's book and decide that their chances of fulfilling their sporting dreams are best doing anything other than football.

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BARCELONA, football's equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters, will provide some star quality in Glasgow next week but there are no shortage of alternative sporting role models passing through Scotland these days. The number crunchers at Event Scotland tell me that when the Le Gruyere European Curling Championships get under way at the intu Braehead Arena this Friday, more than 40 Olympic and Paralympic summer and winter medallists will have competed in this country in their events during 2016, no fewer than 14 of whom have been champions. This includes British sporting royalty like Murray, Mo Farah, Adam Peaty and Max Whitlock plus the Rio golf top three of Justin Rose, Henrik Stenson and Matt Kuchar. Leaving aside Kim Little and the thriving women's game, Scottish football needs to find some new heroes fast if it doesn't want could sink like a stone.