A RAFT of worthwhile suggestions have been made over the years about how to cure the many ills of Scottish football.

The latest are contained within Project Brave and were outlined by SFA performance director Malky Mackay yesterday as he paid a visit to the regional performance school at Braidhurst High School in Motherwell.

Following the example of South Korea’s lady golfers was not among them, though, and has not been floated as a potential remedy before.

But when no less a figure than Sir Alex Ferguson has personally stressed to Mackay that addressing the work ethic of our best youngsters is key to halting the steady and worrying decline of our national game, then perhaps it should be.

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“I met Sir Alex last Friday and he gave me a lot of advice,” said Mackay. “The main thing was about the work ethic of the young players coming through. He spoke to me about what we have to get back to.

“I also had a conversation with Gordon Strachan recently and he was talking about women’s golf in Korea. Five of the top 10 in the world and 37 in the top 100 are from South Korea.

“Why? A lot of them come from a golfing academy just south of Seoul. All they do there is open the gate at 9am and close it at 10pm. One girl would practise for nine hours. So, the girl next to her would practise for 10 hours.

“It was just work ethic – a desire to go and practise more than everybody else. That’s what we have to get back to again in Scotland.”

An SFA working party has certainly beavered away tirelessly putting Project Brave together. They have proposed reducing the number of elite academies from 29 to 16 as well as lowering the number of players involved in the pro-youth set-up to 1200.

These were recommendations which had met with a distinctly frosty response among many senior clubs when they were first made public. Mackay, though, appears to have allayed the widespread concerns which existed about the changes since succeeding Brian McClair in December.

Elite academy status will only be awarded if a number of stringent criteria are satisfied. Thereafter, funding will be dependent on how many youngsters progress to the first team.

However, Mackay stressed that no club, as had perhaps been feared, would be cast adrift.

“All 29 academies came to the roadshows we had and, by the end of the two-hour presentation, it was only technical questions being asked,” he said. “No-one was throwing bricks. Nobody was screaming blue murder. That’s because it is common sense.

“The devil will be in the detail. But, generally, [Project Brave] has been very well received, with no shouting matches.”

One of the key recommendations contained within Project Brave is the reintroduction of the reserve league. Mackay knows from personal experience just how helpful playing with seasoned professionals can be to a youngster’s development.

“I played alongside Gary Gillespie, when I was in the reserves at Celtic,” he said. “I was speaking to Barry Ferguson, recently. He played against Peter Grant, who was returning from injury, in the reserves and he’s got to shift it quickly otherwise Granty will be right at him and dominating him.”

Mackay is also optimistic that appointing a head of coaching to oversee the development of young coaches will improve the quality of training sessions which our best youngsters receive.

“We are not good at mentoring coaches in this country,” he said. “We are failing as far as that goes.”