THERE is only one event more inevitable than a Scottish national football team’s exit from the qualifying stages of a major tournament. It is this: an editor asking his sports desk to not only discern what is wrong with Scottish football but to come up with a plan to fix it.

Scottish football has thus been subject to more investigations than Al Capone. And you can insert your own tax joke here. There have been more task forces than the Thatcher years. The best minds – and those at the SFA – have been delegated to ponder on the matter. The result has been eerily similar to a punter’s Saturday coupon: a lot of thought, some hope, but an end result that reeks of disillusionment rather than fulfilment.

The cry is that we do not produce footballers of old. That is odd. The footballers of old – Jim Baxter, Jimmy Johnstone, Ian St John, Dave Mackay, Alan Gilzean, Bobby Murdoch et al – found qualifying for international tournaments as tricky as understanding a PhD thesis in advanced calculus after the team bonding session in the The Wee Snug. Even Denis Law had to wait until the end of his career to head to a World Cup, in his case Germany of 1974.

However, editors demand to know why we do not produce players of such stature. It is not our job to answer why, simply to do and lie.

Here are the top 10 tips to produce a Baxter or a Johnstone. They were formed after consultation in the public bar. A sort of 10-pint plan, if you will.

1 There is no street football. The solution is simple. In the spirit of Banksy’s Dismaland the authorities should create the tenement blocks of old so youngsters can play on the streets. Traffic should not be banned. It helps the youngsters develop a swerve. Elite players should move swiftly to the middle lane of the Kingston Bridge for a 4.30pm kick-off.

2 There is no proper nutrition. The sports scientists with their protein, carbohydrate and gluten nonsense should be dismissed. Young footballers should be fed pieces of sugar delivered from a great height from the top of a tenement. This has many benefits. It means practice is not interrupted, that the delivery system ensures speed to the dropped piece is of the utmost importance if one is to survive and it also ensures that players do not suffer from toothache in their later careers. Unless their dentures are too tight.

3 Hydration. There should be no energy drinks. All hydration should be supplied by American Cream Soda. This should be shared by all the team. This produces a series of floaters that are useful for sustenance.

4 Football boots should only be worn on a Saturday. Wearing 10-bob sliders (gutties as they are known in technical terms) improves stamina in parks that were reminiscent of Flanders fields after a bombardment. They also developed the proper way of kicking a ball. One did not dare apply big toe in a guttie to a bladder. Unless the bladder was part of the opposing centre half.

5 Football boots should be treated as if they were a religious artefact, say the bones of St Adidas or the ruptured spleen of St Nike. They should be cleaned after the match and placed on an altar (or a shelf in the hall cupboard) and only be brought on feast days to be placed on the tootsies for a proper match. They should only be black. If you want to wear pink, red or yellow boots, join a circus.

6 Kids should not be allowed replica strips. There were no replica strips in my day. One only wore a strip when going about the serious business of winning a game for the school team or the boys’ club. The strip was thought to give the wearer super powers. It was the uniform of a warrior, not the plaything of some innocent kid who has swallowed the belief that Barca’s away kit is something other than an advert with a badge.

7 Ban all computer games. In our days, toys consisted of a compendium of games and a mouth organ. Tired of playing ludo to a Larry Adler soundtrack, we headed for football pretty pronto.

8 Kids should not allowed to play on good surfaces, particularly artificial grass. All football should be learned on the street where falls are sore and thus agility is learned the scabby way. Games can be conducted in parks. This aids speed in avoiding the parkie though it has the complication of some players dropping out with serious injuries caused by repeated close contact with the collateral damage from dog-walking.

9 All other sports should be banned. Football in my day – and that of Baxter and Johnstone – was the only sport. Running was restricted to escaping punishment or competing in the school sports day. Tennis was two weeks at Wimbledon with a ball so fluffy it could have been (maybe was) a Pekingese dug and a racket so used its strings gave as much as a philanthropist.

10 There should be no proper coaching. The jannie should take all fitba’ training. Misplaced passes or a bad touch were easily cured when the jannie gave you his mop and bucket of sawdust and told you clean up the mess caused by the emotional trauma of wee Senga’s first day at school.