Back in the mid-nineties the magazine I edited had an annual ritual which involved going round the nation's rugby correspondents asking them for their Five Nations Championship predictions.

It was essentially just a bit of fun but when one of those esteemed fellows predicted for a third successive season that Scotland would win a Grand Slam a follow-up call seemed in order.

Admittedly it was not as ridiculous a piece of soothsaying as it would be now, but given that Scotland had managed the feat just twice in the previous 70 years it seemed valid to ask him just how much consideration he was giving the question.

For all that it may not have been high on integrity his explanation made considerable tactical sense in terms of prospective relations with the players and management.

"I know it's not very likely to happen, but if they do win it I don't want to be the bloke who didn't back them," he said.

I thought about that again a couple of weeks ago when listening to a radio programme which had three Scottish guests, one a sports journalist, another a former international cricketer and the third a regular rugby pundit.

At its end each was asked how they thought that weekend's Scotland v Wales encounter would go.

The journalist and the cricketer both reluctantly admitted to expecting Wales to win. The rugby expert then brightly announced that he would end things on a positive note by anticipating a Scotland win.

Albeit against a very different background in terms of Scottish performances on the rugby field, it seemed that exactly the same game was being played as that of 20 years ago and it has become an exceedingly common approach in terms of rugby analysis in Scotland.

An environment has been created in which no-one dare suggest that the Emperor has no clothes, yet this particular Empire claimed to have a strategy that would see it conquer the world this year and it is in that context that the true ugliness should be confronted.

Under those who declared they had a strategy for winning the 2015 World Cup Scotland has played a total of 22 competitive matches... five have been won, two against Italy, one against Georgia and one against Romania.

The one stand out triumph two years ago, still saw an Ireland side that was missing Jonny Sexton and Paul O'Connell register the only try of the game in a 12-8 defeat.

This regime also took over immediately after Edinburgh achieved an all-time Scottish best of reaching a Heineken Cup semi-final. The coach who brought that about was subsequently sacked and, well, in terms of how things have panned out since, suffice to say there had been a great deal of angst in Wales about the state of the Cardiff Blues prior to their victory in the battle of the capitals last weekend.

Glasgow Warriors meanwhile similarly achieved an all-time European best under the coach who was in charge when this regime took power, finishing runners-up in their Heineken Cup pool. Since then they have finished bottom of their pool twice and third this time around.

All this in spite of a vast increase in the budgets available to both clubs.

If this was football with another whitewash looming there would be howls of outrage, but in rugby those making these decisions are protected by analysis that swiftly dismisses the most recent evidence of failure in this anxiety to be seen as positive.

In modern Scottish rugby there has been far too little analysis of the reasons for on-going problems and in that context, amid this latest crisis, it was hard to know whether to laugh or cry when the SRU announced, all matter-of-fact this week, that it is at last bringing forward measures to introduce improved youth competition within schools and clubs.

No mention of this being a long overdue response to the instruction made by its clubs all of six years ago and backed heavily by then national coach Frank Hadden, to introduce an integrated national competition.

Failure to act upon that for so long has, in effect, cost an entire generation the opportunity to participate in the improved competitive environment that is required to hone skills at the right stage.

That, in turn, only accentuates the nature of the achievement in terms of the one conspicuous improvement brought about as a result of the coaching overhaul that this regime effected with the Under-20s having claimed back-to-back victories against Wales and Italy.

In spite of a perennial shortage of raw material, due to the feeble youth set-up, it is the second time in three years that the Under-20s, who won just one of 10 matches under their previous coach, have registered two wins, a truly remarkable achievement.