Since unexpectedly reaching the men’s doubles final at last year’s Scottish Open Grand Prix it has been a tumultuous time for Adam Hall.

The blood of the then 20-year-old Scot still runs cold when he remembers the mistakes he made at a crucial stage of that final, but he and partner Peter Mills had done brilliantly to get themselves in a position where they could have taken the title and in any event it was nothing to the emotional trauma that was to follow.

The pair were based at the time at British Badminton’s HQ in Milton Keynes but just weeks later they were part of a group of young athletes whose world was in disarray after UK Sport axed their funding, in spite of the programme having achieved its target of winning an Olympic medal, apparently because they won the wrong one.

In advance of the Games in Rio the expectation had been that Chris and Gabby Adcock would contend in mixed doubles. Instead, after they exited, Chris Langrdige and Marcus Ellis went the other way in proving that the nature of sport is that competitors are not machines and can sometimes exceed their rankings just as they can sometimes fail to match them.

That was not predictable enough for the statistics obsessed funders, however and the aspirations of a squad of young athletes were disregarded by their number crunchers.

While several, including his partner Mills, were forced for economic reasons to quit the sport, Hall knows he is one of the luckier ones because he and Kirsty Gilmour, the only Scots on the programme, were supported by Badminton Scotland and the Institute of Sport.

He acknowledges that it has a danger of sounding melodramatic but describes being afflicted by ‘survivor’s guilt’ when he thinks of the plight of some of his contemporaries and he is righteously angered by what has happened.

“When you look at other sports, there are so many opportunities to win a medal,” Hall observed. “We have five events and we can usually only qualify for one person (or pair) in each. That’s huge pressure, which is why we were so happy when they got that medal because up until then we had been worrying about the funding getting cut, but after getting that it completely blind-sided everyone, not just the players, all the background staff in GB Badminton.”

The debate over UK Sport’s use of public money, funding sports that only a handful can participate in while neglecting those that are widely popular and can get youngsters active, is a growing concern which Hall inadvertently touched upon.

“We’re in the top five sports in the country for participation and we have a lot of really good juniors, especially in Scotland, but there’s such a huge gap to go before you can start making a living on badminton,” he noted, admitting to feeling as if he is still sponging off his parents, while expressing gratitude for the support he receives.

He expresses pride, too, at the way the current generation have recovered from, as he sees it, being thrown on the scrap heap, noting that a haul of four British medals at the recent European Championships was the latest indicator of potential.

“It was very much premature cutting the funding completely, but f you look since then badminton has really bounced back I’m really proud of how we as a sport have taken this adversity and showed we could perform well, saying ‘We’re going to get some results and show you you’re wrong,’” he said.

His own part in that has seen him form a new partnership with fellow Scot Alex Dunne, their results in the few months they have been together taking them to 61st place in the world, just six places away from qualification for the Commonwealth Games.

Hall also drew inspiration from another compatriot Kirsty Gilmour’s recent run to the quarter-finals of the World Championships when they were held in Glasgow in August and, he tipped the Commonwealth and European champion who has taken Scottish play in singles to new levels, to shine again in the same arena this week.

“This is Gilmour’s year,” he enthused. “She was fantastic at the Worlds, so close to getting a medal and I thought she was going to do well because she’d been really focused and playing well in training in the couple of weeks before it.

“Gilmour helped me a lot before my final and she’s the standard to aim at, not just in badminton. She’s just so professional. Always one of the first into training and always one of the last ones out. She really commits and she’s a class act. The whole package. Especially for girls coming up she is the person you aim for. That’s who you want to emulate.”

The Scottish Open Badminton Grand Prix takes place at The Emirates Arena from November 22 to 26.