AFTER watching the Scottish Football Association’s laughable attempt at organising the draw for the next round of the William Hill Scottish Cup, I suddenly realised why Scotland continually fail to make the finals of the two major football tournaments, the European Championships and the World Cup.

It was a thought that recurred when Scotland lost to Wales in the RBS 6 Nations at the weekend. That’s another tournament we won’t win, and though we can blame rotten referees as long as we like – how did they miss the double offence by Wales before the opening try? – the fact is that Scotland are now facing Italy in Rome a week on Saturday in yet another Battle of the Wooden Spoon.

There is a link between the Scottish football team and the Scottish rugby team. They have both been underachieving for years, despite occasional high points such as our rugby lads doing well in the World Cup last year, and our football team beating France twice in the qualifying group for Euro 2008 – not that it mattered as we didn’t make the finals. And after all, that was eight years ago.

So how did the botched Cup draw make me think of failure on the field? The answer is simple – both the SFA and the Scottish Rugby Union have two major tasks and they are not very good at them.

Those tasks are to manage their respective sports in Scotland, and to provide us with the National XI and XV.

It is no secret that the SRU ferociously opposed professionalism in rugby back in the 1990s, and took a very long time to adjust to the sport’s new status. It could be argued that Glasgow Warriors’ success in the Pro-12 last year was the first time that the SRU’s blueprint for professional rugby had actually worked, 20 years after the game turned pro.

We are finding new players, even if we have to import them, and though the game at grassroots level is struggling, nevertheless rugby is still being played across Scotland and believe me, there were many of us who thought that the sport might just wither and die under the old amateur SRU.

The SFA seems to limp from crisis to crisis, not all of it self-inflicted. Even 15 years ago, no one could possibly have foreseen the catastrophic implosion of Rangers, which I believe has seriously impacted on the Scottish national team.

And here’s my point – if they were being independently judged on the results of our national football and rugby teams, both the SFA and the SRU would long ago have been put out of their misery.

The two governing bodies could and should have been sacked, disbanded or completely replaced, so poorly have they carried out the task of providing the national teams.

They can bleat all they like about the lack of resources in Scotland, but the fact is that there has always been a disparity between this country and the most successful football and rugby nations, yet Scotland won the Grand Slam in 1984 and 1990and the Scotland XI regularly reached the finals of the European Championships and World Cup.

I often despair that I will never get to see Scotland at the Euros or World Cup again, because those were some of the best days of my life.

As for Scotland winning the Six Nations? Don’t make me laugh. Under the current arrangements there is simply no chance of that happening, and it’s now 17 years since we won the last Five Nations’ championship in 1999.

The SFA and SRU have a difficult enough task in governing their sports. It’s a job of management more than anything, and frankly they are both wanting in that department.

They are definitely failing in their task of running the national teams. That is not to blame Gordon Strachan and Vern Cotter because there is no doubt that Scotland’s football and rugby teams have improved under those men – they just haven’t improved enough.

All the while in the background there’s huge pressure on the coaches and players from the governing bodies who depend on the national sides to raise revenue so that they can keep paying the administrators’ wages, not to mention the expenses and dinners of the blazerati.

So here’s a revolutionary concept. The SRU and the SFA should both hive off the management of the national teams to an independent body – a trust, for example – whose sole job would be to run the XV and XI and the age grades and women’s teams.

The Scottish Football National Trust and the Scottish Rugby National Trust would be given sufficient budgets to manage that one aspect of the two sports. They would be accountable and transparent, with managers and players given four-year contracts from one World Cup to another, with the target being qualification for the second stage of the World Cup finals in football, and the winning of a Six Nations championship for rugby. Failure to achieve those aims would see the team managers and coaches replaced.

Hiving off the national team management would then free up the SFA and SRU to do the job of running their sports properly.

Judged by the performance of the national teams, both the SRU and SFA are failures. Would it not be at least good for them to be able to blame someone else who, after all, might actually do the job better than them?