When two time world champion Dave Murdoch finally won an Olympic medal at the third time of asking he could have been forgiven for deciding that his life’s work as a curler was complete and those who only follow the sport when the major championships come around could have been forgiven that is what happened.

A near ever present on Scotland and Great Britain duty at European and World Championships as well as the Winter Olympics over the previous decade, he has not been back since reaching the final in Sochi to claim that silver medal.

That changes today when he and Olympic colleagues Greg Drummond, Scott Andrews and Michael Goodfellow take to the Edmonton ice against a youthful Norwegian quartet in their opening match at this year’s World Championships and the unprecedentedly long wait to lead his team into action means Murdoch – who has also become a dad in the interim - is more motivated than ever as, setting aside the 2015 championships where he went as an alternate for old pal Ewan MacDonald’s rink, he ends his “longest break since I broke into the scene in 2003.”

That has partly been down to what he considers to be much improved domestic competition, praising British Curling organisers for having found ways of exposing more teams to international competition in order to raise standards and Murdoch acknowledges that they have been forced to re-set their standards rather than resting on Olympic laurels.

“It really makes you evaluate where you are as a team when you’re not achieving your end goal,” he said.

“Sometimes you can win and you’re maybe not covering all those aspects, so in some ways the fact that we’ve not has really allowed us to break down every department of what we’re doing, whether that’s technique, whether it’s psychology, whether it’s our physical prep. We’ve actually broken that down a lot more to work out where we can get some gains and where we can get an advantage… what can we do better.

“Not getting those goals does make you strive to achieve them. You don’t like not winning. When you’re a team that’s used to winning and you’re not then it really drives you harder to get back there because you miss it, you miss playing on the big stage. We have missed playing on the big stage because we feel we’ve been good enough to be there, but other teams have out-played us and rightfully stopped us from doing that, but we’ve got that really big hunger and desire to get back and I’m glad we have.”

The controversial way he was catapulted into what had been Tom Brewster’s team ahead of Sochi, ultimately taking over as skip, has been well documented and while they picked up world and Olympic medals together during what Murdoch now describes as having been something of ‘a honeymoon period’, the hard work of forming their own team dynamic was only just beginning at that stage.

“You get to know each other a lot better when you’ve been through a lot more as a team and when it’s just the four,” he observed.

“The guys were really young to be going to championships but now they’ve had a few more years, they’ve got that bit more maturity, they’ve learned a lot more, they have that drive themselves as well. We play differently now to the way we used to, working out what suits our style, what works for us.

“You’ve got to figure out what you’ll do well at and how you’re going to win and that’s certainly been the case for us. So it’s been great all round having that platform of developing. We’ve worked on a ton of things and hopefully it’s paying off.”

Meantime, though, the sport has been changing to the extent that the 38-year-old, who made up for a Olympic disappointment when winning his first world title in 2006, then suffered another let down four years later when he arrived in Turin as the reigning world champion but failed to medal, reckons it will be tougher than ever this week at an event which will see them attempt to secure Team GB's place in the men's event at next year's Olympics in Pyeongchang and put down a marker on their own behalf against both domestic and international rivals.

“You’ve just got a lot more professional teams,” he noted.

“I’m not saying the standard is higher, but the teams are probably better prepared and doing the same amount that we’re doing now, whereas we were probably ahead of the game back then (’06 and ’09) in having a programme. We were one of the first ever professional teams back in ’06. Nobody else had that as their day job.

“It’s what the Olympics has done for it. It’s globalised the sport, it’s professionalised the sport in a way and you’re starting to see people curling pretty much all year round now rather than when it used to be just a winter season, so in that respect it’s been very significant.”

The World Championships get underway in Edmonton today and continue until April 9.