SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY REPORTS
Our decline and fall
Iain Morrison
THE Six Nations Championship will start early this year. In exactly five weeks Scotland will face France at Murrayfield, and two matches will have taken place on the preceding Saturday, Ireland v Italy and England v Wales.

Before then reams will be written about the composition of Frank Hadden's starting XV. Who will play fly-half? Who will partner Scott Murray in the boiler-house? How to mix and match the various propping options? And the Blair versus Cusiter conundrum at scrum-half is sure to get another airing: this one seems set to run longer than The Mousetrap.


International matches are often won on small things, and all these debates are important. The selection of Andy Henderson over Graeme Morrison (or vice versa) might just make the difference between winning and losing, and Scotland desperately need some signs of on-field improvement if the rugby nation is to lift itself out of its habitual gloom.

While these many and various issues are vital for success in the impending championship, however, they are almost entirely irrelevant to the long-term health of the sport in Scotland, which has been in decline this past decade.

Charting that decline has been difficult, simply because the method that the SRU used for totting up numbers encouraged clubs to exaggerate, or at the very least to register absentees more slowly than they should have done, since their numbers were linked to central funding. A figure of 25,000 adult male players was bandied about at the death of the amateur game ten years ago, but this was almost certainly artificially inflated.

The best estimates now put the figure at 7,000-8,000. No-one knows the true number, but a head count is high on the to-do list of the Murrayfield apparatchiks. Anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp fall in playing figures because any number of clubs that formerly ran four teams now field one or two. Several clubs, such as Hawick Trades, have all but disappeared, and others, including Gordonians and St Boswells, are teetering on the brink of extinction. The unfortunate Borderers have scored just ten points this season while conceding 1188, and struggle to put 15 players on the field. Such statistics may reward them with a listing in the Guinness Book of Records, but is an unenviable and unsustainable state of affairs.

Rugby now has barely more players than cricket can boast in Scotland, and almost twice as many people cast stones along a curling ice rink than chase an oval ball at the weekend.

Any number of reasons can be offered for this decline in numbers, with the vast range of alternative pursuits one of the main ones. Computer and video games have gripped an entire generation, while more active kids now follow some sports that simply were not an option for their fathers: mountain-biking, kite-surfing and snow-boarding are all relatively recent innovations.

There is, too, an ever-decreasing base of children who have countless alternatives on offer, and rugby has to fight tooth and nail for the available bodies. It has no alternative but to hitch up its skirts, flutter its eyelashes and make itself more attractive. Thankfully, that process has started.

The national league referees have been told to clamp down on rucking, which is more often than not used as a cheap and nasty excuse to kick a man on the ground. This ruling has not been extended to Scotland's top three BT Premiership leagues, though goodness knows why not. Kicking a man simply because he is on the ground is no longer accepted at the Rugby World Cup, but it is still tolerated in Scotland's top divisions. If someone prevents fair release of the ball, his place is in the sin-bin, not the infirmary.

At least the SRU have clamped down on other forms of foul play, a recent edict going out demanding zero tolerance for violent behaviour. Let's hope that the referees don't shirk the task in hand, because every time a dust-up occurs on the field, you can guarantee that some mother/girl-friend/wife or concerned other individual will be arguing the merits of mountain-biking or curling, whose participants at least know they are likely to get through the weekend without a punch in the face or a kick in the ribs.

The union are also restructuring the community game, something that seems akin to the Forth Bridge in terms of needing continuous repairs. Their target is to attract 30% more children and 25% more adult players into the game by the year 2009. A union road show is doing the rounds right now, with Glasgow district clubs the final stop of a national tour to explain the new policy of regionalisation which will replace the district structure.

In short, there will be 14 regions, but just eight regional development managers (RDMs), most of whom have been hired, since several will cover more than one region, though the union plan envisages 14 by 2009.

The basic idea is to make the managers accountable to the local clubs and to tie the new rugby regions they run to sportscotland since that body divides the country the same way, and will often match whatever funding the SRU pump into any given region. The new RDMs will also link up with local authorities to take advantage of any synergies that may exist.

For example, the recent report on education by Professor McCrone demanded an increase of physical education in schools, and rugby has to put itself forward as an option for the two hours a week that children will be running around rather than staring at the blackboard.

Several examples exist where the local rugby club run school teams - Gala and Linlithgow academies are as good as any - but there are plans for this to become the norm in areas where teachers lack the expertise or the enthusiasm to run rugby in-house. Some would like to see the union paying for teachers to coach the sport, but under their present financial circumstances it looks likely that a whole raft of unpaid club volunteers will be needed.

In addition, there will be six performance development managers to offer support and training to any club development officers who are on the ground. The union hope to have as many as 50 club DOs operating by the target year of 2009, and funding for these can come from any number of sources, with even Strathclyde Police helping out in one case.

But it remains to be seen whether the structural changes will be enough to attract sufficient numbers back into the game without making the actual 80 minutes of a match more attractive. Cutting back on unnecessary violence in the game is a start, but better weather rugby would also make sense, especially given the recent Arctic conditions, as would more local derbies and consecutive matches.

A recent sportscotland paper on player development has the word fun in capital letters for children between the ages of two and 12, but it disappears thereafter as though it were not an important, possibly crucial, element in persuading teenagers to remain in a sport that is moribund.

The grassroots is all-important, and not just because a broader base enables a higher pinnacle, in sport as in architecture. The people most likely to watch a professional team are amateur club members, so the more of them there are the better chance pro-rugby has of becoming sustainable. Club finances must be fit to survive without union handouts, and growing memberships become an important source of revenue and an equally important source of volunteers.

In turn, the clubs must improve facilities and make themselves family friendly to ensure that the older players with young kids stay in the game, since they are the most likely to offer to coach the minis or to drive the colts to an away game some Sunday morning.

Several hugely successful clubs out there are already bucking the trend: Ellon, Orkney and Cartha Queen's Park are among those usually mentioned. The common denominator is a long line of volunteers and masses of hard work, because it takes a huge effort to attract and keep youngsters in the game these days. It is perhaps significant that these clubs operate in areas outside the traditional heartland of the game, because it may be easier for these relative newcomers to adjust to what is a completely new social and financial environment.

It has often been said, but it is worth repeating: without the clubs there would be no game. Frank Hadden and his elite players will determine the level of Scottish achievement in the upcoming Six Nations and even RWC 2007. But the ability of amateur clubs across the country to flourish in the harsh professional era will determine the level of Scottish success in future events.

This article was originally posted on 1-Jan-2006, 13:16 by Hugh Barrow.
Last updated by Hugh Barrow on 1-Jan-2006, 15:09.