Scotland may look to youth as they rebuild

Scotland may turn to youth as they look to rebuild in the wake of their failure to qualify for the 2011 World Cup.

"We have younger players coming through and, hopefully, next time the team will be well prepared and can deliver," Roddy Smith, Cricket Scotland's chief executive, told the BBC. "We went out there with high hopes of doing very well. We were aiming for top four as a minimum and hopefully getting to the final.

"We had our best players out there but they didn't manage to perform through the whole course of the tournament, with a few notable exceptions. The team were very well prepared but when push came to shove, they just didn't fire. It's a collective failure by everyone concerned." Smith defended criticism of the team selection, insisting that it was "the best group based on form and experience," adding that "at the time, there weren't too many people complaining about the make-up of the squad.

"But we are still on the world stage and we will have a set number of fixtures against the top sides over the next four years. But we've managed to retain our ODI status, which is a huge boost for us over the next four years, so it's not the complete end of the world."

Scotland only kept that after beating UAE in the final Super Eights match, but their relief was short-lived as they were beaten by Afghanistan in the fifth-place play-off.