Jim Mallinder, Scottish Rugby’s performance director, has assured Kenny Murray that his job is safe – despite the coach overseeing yesterday’s catastrophic defeat for Scotland Under-20s against Uruguay at the Junior World Trophy in Kenya.

“Kenny is doing a good job,” he claimed. “He’s getting that team better. He’s put in some great preparation. The squad are improving but if you look at the game-time of these youngsters, they’ve not played enough.

“I’ve been through it this week with our statistician and only about five or six are playing nearly every week. How can we have one of our starting players who has only played 80 minutes of rugby in the last three or four months? No wonder we’re getting 12 injuries, we’re not playing the quality and quantity of rugby, not exposing them to the right levels.

“I’m confident in Kenny and the coaching team. We need to support him and make these changes.”

Mallinder may have a point about this lack of exposure for the nation’s best players, but he struggled to explain why – four years after his arrival in the job – this issue is only just being addressed, especially as Scottish Rugby own both the nation’s pro teams and pumps significant sums of money into the six Super Series sides which are meant to provide a bridge between the traditional club game and the pro tier.

“There are probably half a dozen who are playing regular Super6 [because] those coaches want to improve players, but they also want to win,” he shrugged. “This is why we are taking the bull by the horns and putting our under-20 team in the competition. That is something which is going to happen as soon as we get back from this tournament.

“I’m not going to get away from this being a big disappointment,” he added. “We need to improve. We’ve seen that over the last couple of years – we’ve not been good enough. We’ve got to start afresh; we can’t keep doing the same things or we will just get worse.

“I feel so sorry for Kenny because he’s such a good coach. We’ve had about 12 of our best players unavailable to play in this tournament because of injuries. We’re not using that as an excuse because we know where we are at. We are short of quality players – we need to give them better game time and improve their physicality.

“We are in a low position, really disappointed. I’ve just been in that dinner hall and there was silence from those lads. They didn’t play particularly well, some of our decision-making was really, really bad and we can get a lot better. That’s a poor performance. We understand where we are at, and that’s why we are making these changes to the structure, not changes to the coaches.”