As the first day’s play ended the leading Scot in the field was a 53-year-old who had not played in the Open Championship for six years and had said his principal motivation for attempting to qualify was the prospect of playing on what he considers his home course. Colin Montgomerie had finished that round on level par and by the end of the second there was still not a single member of the home contingent under par.

Perhaps more to the point not one of the sextet representing Scotland here was under 30 years old, the youngest of them American-based Russell Knox - who had replaced Montgomerie as the domestic front-runner by halfway - having turned 31 last month.

Of the others Sandy Lyle who had a hideous time of it, finishing on 21-over-par, last among those who completed 36 holes and Paul Lawrie, owe their involvement to feats performed in the distant, if not so dim.

To his credit, despite suffering from a troublesome foot injury, Lawrie remains highly competitive, as demonstrated by making the cut again yet having, along with Marc Warren - who finished 11-over-par this time around - given the more partisan in the St Andrews crowd something to shout about at last year’s Open.

Richie Ramsay - the former US amateur champion who is next best to Warren among the homegrown players from a generation of which much more was expected according to those running Scottish Golf’s development programmes - has meanwhile never done better in this event than tied 58th, a record the Aberdonian extended by missing the cut.

Those of us old enough to have been in Ayrshire covering this championship when Lyle arrived as defending champion 30 years ago have witnessed a decline so significant that it raises serious questions about what has been going on.

At that Open at Turnberry in 1986 more Scots made the cut than got into the event this time around, while more than twice as many teed it up as the championship got underway, Brian Marchbank, of Gleneagles fame, finishing top among them in eighth place, a shot behind Seve Ballesteros, level with Fuzzy Zoeller and a couple of shots clear of the likes of Curtis Strange and Ray Floyd.

We could not have imagined then that there would be more Japanese players and as many Koreans as players from ‘the home of golf’ qualifying for an Open in Scotland, even at a time when the Scottish Golf Union (SGU), was run by a couple of amiable fellows, Graham Ewart and the late Ian Hume, with one administrative staff member and not since they left office in the late nineties has a Scottish player come through the amateur ranks to so much as get into the Ryder Cup team.

The only Scots to reach that level since have been Lawrie, who never had a sufficiently low handicap to get into the SGU-run Scottish Boys Championship before serving his apprenticeship as an assistant professional, Montgomerie and Stephen Gallacher, part of a Scottish golfing dynasty who is also now in his forties having turned professional more than two decades ago.

That in spite of the SGU having been transformed as an operation in the interim as vast amounts of money have been drawn from a variety of commercial and public bodies as the renamed and highly corporate Scottish Golf has claimed to be taking increasing responsibility for the development of the sport and its players, but the legacy left by those who have taken that upon themselves is negligible.

In spite of many of its players being considered as promising as their amateur English and Irish contemporaries who have gone on to win umpteen majors and become the backbone of the European Ryder Cup team that has dominated the Americans in the past decade and more, it had self-evidently failed in that mission prior to the long overdue amalgamation between the Scottish men’s and women’s governing bodies which finally took place less than a year ago, after the R&A had agreed to admit women members no less.

That, in turn, brought about regime change with the appointment of a new board headed by a chair in Eleanor Cannon who has clearly continued that process with an overhaul of senior management, the latest part of which has been the appointment of new chief executive Blane Dodds who was most recently chief executive of North Lanarkshire Leisure and was described on his appointment as having “a track record of increasing participation combined with experience of transformational change,” both of which are very obviously major priorities for Scottish Golf.

He also has a background in the one major sport that has generated significant Scottish success in the past decade or so as a former international tennis player who is the current chair of Tennis Scotland.

In saying so it should be noted that Tennis Scotland has itself not been immune to criticism in recent years, notably including members of the Murray family so Dodds, too, has a fair bit to prove as, next month, he takes on his vital new role of transforming what is in competitive sporting terms an ailing organisation.