When he leads the Scots into action in badminton's individual events, three-time national champion Kieran Merrilees will be shimmying into the second round to face an opponent who prepared for this tournament in a dance hall.

The presence in the draw of 43-year-old Richard Cribb can both be seen as making a mockery of the decision by Commonwealth Games Scotland to prevent two members of the Scottish team - Rebekkah Findlay and Caitlin Pringle - from taking part in the individual competition and as demonstrating the joy of the opportunity provided by this gathering.

While Findlay and Pringle are both players with respectable world rankings, the man from the Norfolk Islands admits to having only taken up badminton with real seriousness in his 40th year, after the last Games in Delhi. He trains on the only court on the Island, an adapted wooden basketball surface which doubles up as a dance floor, which has consequently impacted on his preparation because of rival events and he admitted, with good reason, to being terrified after watching some of the other teams train.

He registered five points in the first of his singles matches in the team event against South Africa's Jacob Maliekal and doubled that tally against Jamaica's Gareth Henry in his next. The three points accrued in his final match against Singapore's Derek Wong, though, meant that in three attempts he had not gathered sufficient points in three matches to claim even a solitary game.

Seeded eighth, Merrilees is not expected to be seriously tested until the quarter-finals where he is due to meet England's Raj Ouseph, his regular training partner in the Milton Keynes-based British programme.

Kirsty Gilmour has the chance to re-discover the form with a fairly clear route to the quarter-finals. She struggled badly in the team event, losing what had the potential to be a pivotal women's singles match to Jing Yi Tee - 16 places below the Bothwell 20-year-old in the world rankings - and doing so by a disturbingly large margin.

With a bye in the opening round she does not have to play until tomorrow, so has had plenty of time to clear her head after that defeat and she has shown the capacity to recover quickly from disappointing setbacks.

She is also to face much lower-ranked opponents and even when she meets sixth seed Michelle Chan, the first player who looks capable of testing her, in the quarter-finals, Gilmour can draw confidence from the fact that she managed to beat the New Zealander in straight games when their teams met in the last of the round-robin matches on Friday.

However, for all that she is playing down its significance, a wrist injury has been giving her niggling trouble over recent months, while the pressure of carrying the greatest expectation of any member of the team - going into the singles tournament as second seed - is a considerable burden for a youngster to carry.

Gilmour also faces a huge challenge in the women's doubles when it gets underway tomorrow, as she and Imogen Bankier face fourth seeds Gabby Adcock and Lauren Smith. Bankier, who partnered Adock's husband Chris when a winning world championship silver medal three years ago, is hoping to have a second showdown with the English woman later in the week since she and Robert Blair are seeded to meet the Adcocks in the semi-final.

However the route to that encounter is by no means as straightforward as it might have been for the third seeds since they are expected to face the dangerous Malaysian combination of V Shem Goh and Loo Yin - a new pairing, but both have good records as doubles players.

In the other half of the draw Paul van Rietvelde, who has had to shake off an ankle injury to take part, and Jillie Cooper are scheduled to meet Canadians Adrian Liu and Michelle Li in the first round.

In the men's doubles Blair and Van Rietvelde have a first round bye as do Martin Campbell and Patrick MacHugh. Both pairs ought to be confident of reaching at least the last 16, since Campbell and MacHugh meet a low-ranked Maldives pair in the second round. Blair and Van Rietvelde could also meet a Maldives pair in Mohamed Sarim and Hussein Zaki or Zambians Ngosa and Mulenga Chongo. Admittedly, unlike Richard Cribb, all of those players have official world rankings, but none of them of an order to offer the Scots concern.