The combined efforts of the most highly regarded Scottish curlers of their generation have been insufficient to keep Scottish hopes alive at the men's World Championships in Canada lending added credence to the case for change in the domestic games.

Dave Murdoch only went to the event, being held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as the alternate player having been the beaten skip when Ewan MacDonald's team won the Scottish Championship, but his vast experience was called upon after defeats to Italy and Finland in their opening two matches put them in trouble.

That reunited three of the team that went to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver - lead Euan Byers being the third - but further defeats to Japan, Norway and the Czech Republic meant their campaign was effectively over in minimum time before they finally registered a victory over Russia yesterday.

Team MacDonald having, as what is essentially an amateur rink, upset Murdoch's full-timers in winning the national title to qualify for the World Championships for a second successive year, the combined outcomes serve to highlight major issues in the domestic game, as Logan Gray, one of the sport's leading commentators, acknowledged yesterday.

"Ewan MacDonald is one of the best players we've ever produced, if not the best," said Gray who was previously involved in the GB curling programme.

"I think he probably still does a lot of training. I don't know what the reasons are for them not playing well out there.

"Last year I think everybody felt the ice conditions didn't particularly suit his game, which is why they didn't do very well. I know Ewan was really disappointed with that performance and wanted to really turn things around this year and put in a good positive performance.

"I believe he's struggling with the draw weight a little bit and just not making the shots he usually makes (but) they don't practise as much as they used to and the game's moved on a lot in the last four years I would say."

There is a degree of embarrassment for the professional programme in that full-time curlers Greg Drummond, Scott Andrews and Michael Goodfellow, who claimed an Olympic silver medal with Murdoch as their skip last year, are all at home while, for the second time this season, an amateur rink is representing Scotland, Dave Edwards' team having beaten them to the right to play in the European Championships earlier this season.

That is partly down to the nature of a sport where, as Gray put it there are "very small margins, so you can put your heart and soul into training but there's still a chance that a pub team is going to beat you on the day."

He made it clear that no such description could be applied to either of the teams led by MacDonald and Edwards, but the key point is that those training full-time are not getting the chance to maximise their performance, while their rivals have, according to Gray, upped the ante in the way they are preparing teams with access to year-round, high-quality practise conditions.

"I think there's a really good understanding of curling in Scotland, the strategy, the tactics, that side of things," he said.

"Where we need to improve and we've started to in the last four years, is we need to do more work technically.

"The first five years I was on the programme I did loads and loads of practise but didn't necessarily get much coaching and I was practising all the wrong things and I never got any better.

"At the start of the last cycle Soren Gran came along (as head coach) and started to challenge us more from a technique point of view and gets us all moving forward.

"For the men's squad in particular he's really turned things around and got us focussing on the right things for us to become better curlers because strategically Scotland is pretty good when you look at all the other curlers out there but technically we're miles behind. So we can call all the right shots, we just can't make them."

That will not change, Gray believes, until the right facilities are put in place with the establishment of the long mooted national performance centre.

"There's no doubt we need more curling dedicated facilities to reproduce these international ice conditions that we're going to get," he said.

"If you don't practise on them then you're not going to be able to deal with them when you come to playing in arena ice conditions."

As things stand, however, the difficulties encountered in international competition are highlighting the conflict between the risk of complacency if teams are simply selected from among a small pool of full-timers and that of sending less well prepared teams to represent Scotland.

"It's not an easy problem to tackle," Gray admitted.

"There's nothing to say Ewan MacDonald's not going to win the next two (Scottish Championships) as well and he's going to be responsible for getting Team GB to the Olympics.

"We're relying on teams that are completely working on their own accord, their own agenda and relatively under-prepared. There's no getting away from the fact that they are still extremely good players, but they're not as well-prepared as full-time guys.

"I just looked at it this morning because I was hoping there are no Olympic qualifying points up for grabs this year at the Worlds because we're not going to get any and to be honest it would be a bit of a failing for Scotland if we ended up in the Olympic qualification event.

"If Scotland ended up in that situation that's a scary, scary situation to be in because if we don't make the Olympics then funding is slashed."