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 outlined 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 wasn't among them, though, and hasn’t been floated as a potential remedy before.

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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.

"I met Sir Alex last Friday and he gave me a lot of advice,” he said. “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 ten 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 practice for nine hours. So, the girl next to her would practice for 10 hours.

"It was just work ethic - a desire to go and practice 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 in elite academies from 29 to 16 as well as halving the number of players involved in the pro-youth set-up from 2,500 to 1,200.

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 at a series of meetings which have been held across the country.

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Elite academy status will only be awarded if a number of stringent criteria are satisfied. Thereafter, funding will be increasingly 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. Once the document goes out, some will say they can’t afford the full-time staff or meet the measured performance outcomes. If that’s the case then are they actually an elite academy or just a really good community project?

“But, generally, it’s been very well received, with no shouting matches. There have been a lot of clubs who have come to these meetings feeling angry but, once they realise what’s on offer, they’ve decided to try and bid.”

Mackay continued: “Initially most of the money will go to the clubs in terms of this bid, most of it will be based on their criteria in terms of their coaches, full-time staff, business plan. There will be a bit of it that will be the measurable performance outcomes.

“But, going forward, more and more of it will become about the measurable performance outcomes. It is all about what the clubs are doing going forward. Are you putting players into the first team? Are you getting players into the Scotland team? Are you loaning out players and taking in loans of young Scottish players? So the incentives get bigger for that part of it."

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 and is hopeful it will also have a considerable impact when it is rolled out next season.

“I do think it will be significant,” he said. “I played alongside Gary Gillespie, when I was in the reserves at Celtic. He was 35-years-old and had won the European Cup and it was massively beneficial for me.

“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.

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“They are challenges that 20-year-olds aren’t getting in a game against 20-year-olds. So the more where you can get older v younger and older playing alongside younger is going to help them.”

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 sat mentoring coaches in this country,” he said. “We haven’t done it. We are great at coach education, we really are. Our coach education department is as good as anything in Europe.

“The continuing professional development is good. Fifty people will turn up one night at Hampden to listen to Marcelo Bielsa talk about Atletico Bilbao’s pressing against Man United. But what we’re not good at is the mentoring after that because it’s not something that has been done before. We are failing our coaches as far as that’s concerned.

“We give them the driving licence and then two years later we expect them to drive a Formula One car. They crash it and people wonder why. It’s because we never taught them to be a Formula One driver, we taught them to be a driver.

“What we have got to do and what I am going to do going forward is bring in a head of coaching. Myself, him and the national coaches will be out in the clubs.

“It will become standard practice that an SFA coach will one week go into the club, watch coaching, watch the Scottish players and tweak what the coach does.

“On top of that I am going to ask the clubs for their best young coach. We will maybe get 10 in the first year and we will put on specific sessions for them one night a month. Then take another 10 away the following year.”

Clubs will be urged to loan their leading youngsters out to lower league outfits increasingly in the future. Mackay, the former Watford and Cardiff City manager, has witnessed many examples of this working in England and is hopeful it will have a similar impact in Scotland.

“Harry Kane had six loans out of Tottenham during his development,” he said. “When I was at Watford I had Tom Cleverley on loan from Manchester United.

“Sir Alex had a four year plan for him. He gave him to Leicester, who were in League One, then to Watford in the Championship, then to Wigan in the Premier League. He then brought him back to United in the fourth year, having played 120 games of first team football, and he was more prepared to be part of United’s squad.

“It is something which is now starting to happen up here in Scotland. It’s something we have to push more and more. We have to try and make the loan system more flexible as well. I’ve been talking to Iain Blair at the SPFL about that.”