"TRIPLES all round!" the nation cried when Steven Fletcher transformed himself from being Mr Profligate and became Mr Prolific for Scotland against Gibraltar at Hampden on Sunday evening.

As you are probably tired of reading, by grabbing three goals Fletcher became the first player to score an international hat-trick for Scotland since 1969.

Or rather, the first to do it in football. In rugby, a trio of tries is not exactly a common occurrence, but in the 46 years that had passed since Colin Stein banged in his set against Cyprus, nine Scots managed to get themselves over the whitewash three times in the course of a single match.

Iwan Tukalo even did it twice - against Ireland in 1989 and against Zimbabwe two years later. That said, Scottish rugby's hat-trick drought was even longer than football's, as 61 years went by between Arthur Wallace collecting his three against France in 1926 and John Jeffrey matching the feat against Romania in the 1987 World Cup in New Zealand.

Jeffrey thus became the first Scottish forward to score a hat-trick. Twenty years later, Ally Hogg became the second, also in a World Cup context and also against Romania, when he got his three at the 2007 tournament in France. Remarkably, no player, forward or back, has scored three tries in one Test since.

Hogg played 48 times for his country between 2004 and 2009. He was pretty much a shoo-in selection during that period, but his international career came to a juddering halt when Andy Robinson - who had used him relentlessly when he was coaching Edinburgh - decided he could live without the versatile flanker/No.8 when he took over the reins for Scotland. At 26, pretty much the prime age for a loose forward, his days as a Test player were over.

No sensible explanation was ever given. The sport's professional chin-strokers surmised that Hogg was too much of a Jack of All Trades - capable of doing a decent shift in all the back-row positions, but not outstanding in any of them - but in the modern game that versatility is generally looked on as a virtue, if only in terms of claiming a place on the bench. The abruptness of his departure from the Test scene inevitably raised suspicions of fall-outs behind the scenes, but any scars would surely have been healed by the passage of six years and the fact we are now two coaches down the line from the Robinson era.

The one argument that could never be sustained is that Scotland have been so wonderfully well blessed with breakaway forwards, and so successful on the park, that players of Hogg's calibre have been superfluous. In the years that have passed since his summary exclusion from the international fold, Scotland have only once finished above the bottom two in the Six Nations table, have suffered two whitewashes in the tournament and also failed to get out of the pool stages of the World Cup for the first time ever.

What would Scottish fans have given for the hard-nosed experience and rugby nous of a player like Hogg in the Six Nations that has just ended? There was an impression, both powerful and worrying, that the Scots lacked strong leaders on the field during the championship, that they simply did not have the sort of strong characters who could deal with problems as they arose. The fact they failed to score a single point after the interval in three of their five games only reinforces the suspicion that they were crying out for experience.

That much was clear in the 40-10 hammering by Ireland that brought Scotland's tournament to its ignominious close. The Irish had leaders and fixers all over the pitch, but most especially in the back row. The Scottish back row averaged just over 13 caps per man; the Irish figure was just a nudge under 50. What's that old rugby expression about men against boys?

But wait. Between the end of Robinson's time as Scotland coach and Vern Cotter's arrival to do the job, we had Scott Johnson as caretaker. During that time, Johnson consistently claimed that his role was to blood new players and get them up to Test rugby speed. In the space of 15 months, he gave first caps to 17 of them. Yet only three of that 17 started against Ireland.

In other words, the ditching of the old guard in favour of the hip young gunslingers of the Scottish game has been something close to a disaster. Yes, there have been individual successes, but collectively nothing has clicked. It has also flown in the face of common sense and rugby history. Look back at the sides that have succeeded at recent World Cups and you will see teams with a lot of miles and a lot of experience on the clock.

Scotland look to be heading into this year's tournament without those qualities. There is promise aplenty, but the side still looks alarmingly raw. As it happens, Hogg is injured at the moment, but Cotter should take a long, hard look at players like Kelly Brown and John Barclay, both of whom have also dropped off the radar screen in the past couple of years. Without characters like those, the nagging worry is that his squad will look like lambs heading for another embarrassing slaughter when the World Cup comes round.

AND ANOTHER THING

In yesterday's Herald Sport, Alan Lorimer provided a concise and timely report on how a handful of private institutions have come to dominate schools rugby in Scotland by signing trophy coaches and hoovering talent out of the state sector with bursary and scholarship offers. It is an extraordinary situation, clearly driven by commercial/marketing concerns rather than the wider wellbeing of the pupils.

I only hope that parents thinking of sending their children to such places just stop and think for a few moments. Is the rapacious pursuit of what can only ever be ephemeral success, and which relies on undermining rivals, really the kind of education they want for their offspring? Mens sana in corpore sano? These grubby establishments seem to have forgotten the first bit.