ON the day that Eve Muirhead and her world championship winning team-mates were confirmed as the first players in the Team GB line-up for next year's Winter Olympics, Scotland's leading curler called for more chances to be made available for the team to play in front of their own supporters.

Yesterday's official announcement that Muirhead, Claire Hamilton, Vicki Adams and Anna Sloan, were the first names on the team-sheet was due recognition of their status after an extraordinary year which ended with the youthful quartet being crowned world champions.

At an event at Braehead Arena, during which four further Scots Aileen Nelson, Gregor Ewan, Tom Killin and Bob McPherson - were confirmed in the wheelchair curling team, Muirhead said the extra attention her sport receives every four years is very welcome. However, she believes more could be done to sustain interest in the interim.

"Maybe in Scotland we could do with a few more team events," she said. "If we could get a few more ladies team events I think that would generate interest. We are getting the Swiss and Russians over for a tournament later this year which will be great for us for our sport but you have to have good ice, good stones and the facilities have to be right if we are going to attract teams to come more often. That's why we go to Canada. We go there for the good ice, but if we can step up and create that in Scotland people would want to come here."

Those facilities and the intensity of competition means the Scots spend a great deal of time on the other side of the Atlantic but the programme has worked well for Muirhead as one major title has followed another since her emergence as a teen prodigy in 2007.

That was the year her rink won the first of four World Junior titles in a five-year period until 2011 by the end of which she was established at senior level, too, skipping the Team GB rink at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010. Part of a curling dynasty, her father Gordon having been a world championship winner in 1999, she could hardly have a better inside track on what she will face in Sochi since, just two weeks before she won her world title in Riga, her younger brother Thomas became world junior champion at the Russian venue.

In terms of Olympic experience her rink is meanwhile being coached by the most famous of all Scottish curlers Rhona Howie (Martin as she was) having transformed the image of the sport when television viewers across the UK were enthralled by her gold medal win, secured with the last stone of the 2002 final.

That delivery became known as "the stone of destiny" and while Muirhead produced a similar, ice-blooded effort to secure the world title with her last throw earlier this year against a Swedish rink that had twice previously bested her rink earlier in the event, she now has her sights set on the only major title she has yet to secure.

She is also very conscious that the world championship win has transformed expectations but accepts that readily.

"If you gave me a choice of going to the Olympic Games as world champions or not as world champions I would take world champions all day long," said Muirhead. "It can only be a positive going in as one of the favourites and we've got to take it as a good thing to help us. Yes, it's going to put a massive target on our backs, yes it's going to put a lot of weight on our shoulders but we can only use that to our advantage.

"We know we're capable of winning major championships which winning worlds showed and winning the grand slam [the first European team to win one of those big Canadian events] straight after the worlds proved that was no fluke and we're capable of winning these massive championships so it definitely helps."

That speaks to the extraordinary composure of a formidable competitor but she admitted that even she cracked slightly when finally told what everyone in the sport had known for months.

"It was a massive relief," she said. "As a team we probably had one of the best seasons ever last year so you know you're 90% sure that you're going to be selected, but you've still got that doubt at the back of your mind until you get the phone call. I haven't told many people this but when Rhona came off the phone after telling me I got quite emotional because you've worked so, so hard for it that even though you were kind of expecting it to finally get the heads up that you are in Team GB is just quite fantastic and it's a feeling you can't really describe to be honest."

It is, however, the ice queen that we can expect to see in action in Sochi as she adjusts to a new level of seniority.

"I haven't really thought about it like that before but it is the total opposite this time," she said. "In Vancouver, I was the young one in the team who was skip and now I'm not exactly the old one but I'm the captain leading the team which makes it extra special and I'm super, super happy for the other three girls because they've never been to an Olympics before so for them this must just be unbelievable. Not that it's not for myself, but having been there before I know what to expect."

You suspect that no-one will demand more than Muirhead herself.