John Dunlop, the chief executive of Scottish Squash and Racketball, believes that he and his organisation are victims of a form of corporate bullying.

He raised complaints over what many sports enthusiasts, and squash aficionados in particular, would consider the grotesque prospect of spending the best part of £1m on a Commonwealth Games venue only to have it torn down afterwards. The decision to do that was, he says, concealed from him and his board at SSRL.

When he raised the matter with Glasgow 2014, an organisation set up to stage a single event yet which has 100 times as much money to spend as SSRL – half-a-billion pounds of public money in total – he says the response was not to address the central question but to send him to Coventry.

David Grevemberg, the Glasgow 2014 chief executive, explained that SSRL had not come up with a business plan to cover permanent retention of the all-glass court and told Dunlop that his organisation will no longer deal with SSRL and will only discuss matters pertaining to their plans for squash with sportscotland, another much bigger body that has the licence to spend a vast amount of public money.

This smacks of the response of a powerful organisation that does not like having its rationale questioned by someone it believed had no right to challenge its behaviour and was, accordingly, slapping him down.

It invites closer scrutiny of the issues around the legacy to be left by staging the Commonwealth Games, while leaving Dunlop feeling that he had no choice but to go public in seeking to ensure that they are properly examined.

That is what this comes down to because there is little evidence, at least where squash is concerned, that those within the 350-strong team charged with spending the money are thinking about anything beyond staging a world-class event. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with that: it is what we all hope will enhance Glasgow's global image over the 10 days that the competition brings the spotlight upon it.

After the circus has moved on, it will be down to the city fathers and the domestic sporting community to build on what has happened.

That is the context in which this debate should take place and it should be doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Instead, it appears that there is a failure on the part of Glasgow 2014 to recognise that it has forced the issue into the public arena by refusing to deal with SSRL.

Dunlop is candid enough to acknowledge that he can afford to speak out where chief executives of other sports dependent on sportscotland funding cannot because he is nearer the end of his career than its start. Yet he believes that he is fighting not for his own life but for that of his sport.

This is, he points out, a once-in- a-lifetime opportunity to revitalise squash which had its heyday in the 1970s and 80s but is currently struggling, largely because of its lack of profile, with many clubs operating out of rather dilapidated buildings.

He was startled to discover – and it really is a shocking state of affairs that he did so almost by accident rather than because his organisation was part of the discussion – that some £½m was to be spent on a temporary venue for the Glasgow 2014 squash competition.

In a bid to salvage something of longer-term benefit to his sport, he put together two options:

l the building that will house the squash competition's glass court and could easily be made a multi-purpose facility thereafter, should be made permanent; or

l if it was absolutely necessary for it to be a temporary structure, that it be placed at an eyecatching location that would provide imagery through which he could market the sport.

These proposals seem to have been ignored, while Dunlop has subsequently discovered that the cost of the temporary building at Scotstoun has risen to more than £850,000.

It is possible for us to get too close to a debate to understand its full implications, with personalities and egos getting in the way.

Yet perspective was provided by Sarah Fitz-Gerald, one of the world's greatest squash players of all time, who needed no invitation to air her views on the matter when she was at Scotstoun last week.

Asked what she thought of the six excellent new courts that have been built, she was full of praise before adding, unprompted: "The only sad thing is that . . . Scotland doesn't get to keep the [show] court. [At] every other Games, the host country has kept the all-glass court. So Scotland doesn't end up with the prize which is really disappointing for them, because it's very expensive to have the court, put it up, pull it down and then not keep it.

"When we held the Games in my home town in Melbourne, Australia got to keep the court and it travels around the country. It's just a legacy, and it's a lot of money that Scotland's spending."

It certainly is and those involved in Scottish squash would be failing in their duty if they did not fight to ensure that the investment does not provide maximum benefit for their sport. Not least because the evidence seems to be that if they do not do so, then no-one else will.