“This process has been going on since we came back from the World Cup”
The Scotsman reveals today

THE SRU Director of Performance Rugby Graham Lowe is confident that moving Sean Lineen into a new scouting role and replacing him with Gregor Townsend as Glasgow coach will prove to be one of many decisions that improve Scottish rugby’s record on the European and world stage.

Lowe has kept a relatively low public profile since joining the SRU just over two years ago, which is how former CEO Gordon McKie seemed to like it. The New Zealander was handed a new lease of life when Mark Dodson replaced McKie and has spent this season researching further problems within the Scottish game.


He had planned to announce the changes at the end of the season, but after the news was leaked within days of being agreed, they fronted a hastily-arranged media conference at Glasgow’s Scotstoun base yesterday to explain their thinking behind the controversial shifts.

Dodson stated: “This process has been going on since we came back from the World Cup, where it became clear that we had a whole raft of players to contract for Glasgow and Edinburgh, which has meant that 60 per cent of Graham Lowe’s time has been spent contracting people.

“So it became clear to me that we needed a Head of Player Acquisitions as a permanent appointment, and we worked on a job description and came with the role we offered to Sean last week. Sean will be identifying people that are Scottish-qualified or have the ability to come to Scotland and ply their trade as international stars, and people we can naturalise to become Scottish players as well. He’s more than a chief scout.”

He will also replace Peter Wright as Scotland U20 coach, and the role will cover the exiles network and the southern hemisphere to below even under-16 levels. It aims to tackle the obvious concern that Scottish rugby is being let down by an inability to identify players early enough, backed up by the loss of Steven Shingler to Wales, and the presence of talented young Scots in England age-grade teams, the latest being Scott Wilson, born and bred in the Borders, who will line up against Scotland U18s at Hawick on Sunday.

It also bids to strengthen the scouting of players by professional teams, currently left to coach contacts and watching agent-supplied videos, and the lack of a steady flow of talent in every position, evident particularly at stand-off, centre and tighthead prop over the past decade and more.

As the son of an All Black who switched allegiance to Scotland, Lineen knows more than most the appeal of Scotland and, while obviously taken aback to be dropped as Glasgow coach, he said that it was a role that excited him. Why Townsend was the man to replace him at Glasgow, however, attracted more questioning and Lowe insisted that he had looked long and hard at candidates across Scotland and beyond, including appraising leading club coaches Craig Chalmers, Wright and Ally Donaldson in their club and Scotland representative roles, before speaking to Andy Robinson and Dodson about Townsend’s suitability as the Warriors backs and head coach.

“You have to do your homework and make sure you clear all the decisions you’re making,” he said. “I have spent time in the pro environments and in the international environments [because] when you make this decision you want to make it a winner.

“What I see in Gregor is great potential as a coach. There is a real grounding in the key fundamentals of coaching, with a lot of respect from the players, and there is an opportunity for him to take this forward and I believe that he will take it to a new level. I can’t talk about how Gregor got to this point, but I’m judging this on what I have seen in terms of his preparation for Rugby World Cup and his work in putting the international team together.

“What we want to see,” he continued, “is pro teams positioned in such a way that there are no excuses. There’s a quality budget, plenty of resource and you could argue that might not have been the case in the past.

“We’ve had a level of success with Glasgow looking to be in the play-offs for the RaboDirect and Edinburgh with a home quarter-final in the Heineken Cup, but we want to put both of these teams in a position where they can generate success, which is about play-offs in the Heineken Cup and RaboDirect, and that means making sure we get the right players with the right character and right credentials on the field to deliver.”

Dodson added: “Rugby is one of those games everybody has an opinion about, but we’ve got to take the decisions. We believe that we’re future-proofing Scottish rugby by putting Sean into this role and putting an outstanding candidate into the Glasgow Warriors head coach role, and time will tell.

“But this decision is no different to the dozens of decisions that we’re going to have to make in the next two years to making Scottish rugby

This article was posted on 13-Mar-2012, 09:09 by Hugh Barrow.