Some teams spend so much time building for the future that they forget to worry about the present. Scotland's cricketers are slipping into that position, following yesterday's failure to qualify for next spring's ICC World Twenty20 tournament in Bangladesh. In advance of this event, it had appeared a fairly straightforward proposition for Kyle Coetzer's squad to advance to the finals, given the knowledge that six countries were assured of a passage into the main competition. Not even the most pessimistic Saltire-clad supporter could have envisaged they would lose to the likes of Bermuda and Kenya. But they did. And, despite a strong recovery, fuelled by a series of excellent displays from men in the mould of Matt Machan, Calum MacLeod, Michael Leask and Majid Haq, the plain fact is that Scotland will be absent, while Nepal, Hong Kong and the UAE have joined Ireland, Afghanistan and the Netherlands on the global stage.

In view of the news about Jonathan Trott, which emerged earlier this week, we should avoid using words such as "disaster" and "catastrophe" to describe the Scots' travails in the UAE. Yet there is little doubt Scotland have problems on and off the pitch, they are falling gradually down the ICC rankings, and despite the governing body constantly highlighting the "potential" of their youngsters, there comes a point where you have to forget about jam tomorrow and concentrate on the here and now.

We have now arrived at that juncture and, while it would be wrong to place all the blame on any one or two people, questions have to be asked about the future of national coach, Peter Steindl, considering the wretched sequence of results experienced by his personnel in the last two years. 2013, in particular, has been a horrible season, one where the Saltires bowed out of the YB40 without a solitary victory over an English county, one where they were consistently out-played by their Irish counterparts, and the worry has to be that, deprived of regular contests with the English, 2014 will be a year where it is devilishly difficult for cricket in this country to command any sort of media attention.

After all, there are the Winter Olympics, football's World Cup, the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, Andy Murray defending his Wimbledon title....all manner of high-profile festivals of sport.

And then, there is Scotland's meeting with England in Aberdeen at the start of May and that is pretty much the end of the must-see entertainment for those who love a grand cricket occasion.

In these circumstances, the Scots badly needed to lay down a marker, not merely by reaching the World T20, but by regaining momentum and climbing towards the summit of the Associate nations ladder again. It is only eight years since they travelled to the ICC Trophy in Ireland, remained unbeaten during the whole event, and thumped an Irish ensemble, containing Ed Joyce and Eoin Morgan, in the final in Dublin. Few of us who were at that match envisaged they would plummet from the stratosphere so dramatically in the intervening period, and definitely not with the raw talent at the selectors' disposal, but there has been a marked decline since the 2007 World Cup and the biggest concern is that if Scotland don't book their berth at the 2015 tournament, it will be hard for them to change course or find a coach with any sort of international pedigree.

In plain terms, there has to be a major overhaul of the governance structure in Scotland. The elite clubs have been tossed from one championship format to another, from pan-Scottish formats to regional leagues and then back again, and many of them are fed up with the incessant air of transition. As for the best players, offering them professional contracts has brought a law of diminishing returns in several cases, and it isn't enough to keep winning development awards if the seeds don't grow thereafter.

Ultimately, Ireland will be chasing fresh scalps in Bangladesh. Their Caledonian counterparts will be back home watching the action on TV. Something is drastically wrong with this picture.