SUNDAY HERALD REPORTS

Alasdair Reid on the SRU's need to engage fans



If the empty seats at Murrayfield today are not quite so alarmingly apparent as some commentators had predicted, the urge to cel ebrate rugby’s restoration to the heart of Scottish life should be measured against an item of news that filtered through from France last week.
In brief, it confirmed that Stade Francais, the Paris side lying third in the French championship, fully expect their home match against league leaders Biarritz next month to be a sell-out.

For a side who were foundering in the lower divisions of French rugby a few years ago, filling all 12,000 seats of their Stade Jean-Bouin ground on the west side of Paris amounts to a notable achievement.

Except the game is not being played there, and nor will it take place at the 55,000 capacity Parc des Princes next door.

Staggeringly, the demand for tickets is such that it has been moved to the Stade de France, the international stadium in the northern suburbs of the city, where a full house of 80,000 will mark a remarkable event.

And not for the first time. Last year, the same ground was sold out for the meeting of Stade Francais and Toulouse, a match that set a world record attendance for a club game.

It was a marketing triumph as well as a rugby triumph, for around half the tickets were sold at bargain-basement prices, a ruse that subsequently generated the interest and the momentum to fill the entire ground.

On the evening of the game, remembered by those who were there as one of French rugby’s greatest and most colourful occasions, the Stade de France was the only place that any self-respecting Parisien could be.

Can Scottish rugby learn anything from this French example? Most certainly. Should Scottish rugby try to imitate what the French have done? Most certainly not.

Nor should Scottish officials rush to copy the efforts of Wales and Ireland, whose clubs have set Celtic League attendance records within the past few weeks, or England, where even such a barren rugby desert as the north-east can be nourished to the point where Newcastle Falcons now routinely draw crowds of 8,000 or more.

But they could pick up on the broad theme, common to all the recent success stories of northern hemisphere rugby, of a sport remembering to engage with its community.

I have no idea why rugby has never been able to adopt football’s commercial model, in which spectators can be thought of as detached customers. But I know that attempts to go down that route, notably among English clubs in the early years of professionalism, have almost always ended in grief. And something very similar has happened in Scotland in the past few years.

On a superficial level, it is easy to come up with a long list of reasons why Murrayfield attendances have nosedived – ticket prices, dodgy results, Sunday games – but a significant underlying cause is surely the Scottish rugby public does not feel that powerful bond with the Scotland side that once made attendance at international matches more a matter of duty than choice.

It is strange to reflect that barely a decade has passed since the build-up to an international match routinely featured stern warnings from SRU officials to the effect that anyone purchasing black-market tickets would be boiled in oil and thrown from the castle rock.

Back then, though, the demand was so high that it could support a thriving touting industry, the sort of insidious menace the union’s marketing department would be happy to be wrestling with today.

That era of demand far outstripping supply might be remembered as a golden one for Scottish rugby, but it gave way to a period in which the SRU’s stewardship of the sport was characterised by catastrophic mismanagement, jaw-dropping bungling and an unerring ability to completely screw things up.

In the annals of sports administration, a special hall of shame must be reserved for the eye-watering incompetence of those gentlemen of the SRU’s general committee who turned a rugby rose garden into a weed patch in the mid-1990s, who implemented the muddle-minded strategies that ultimately submerged the union beneath a mounting pile of debt.

There is no point now in picking over the bones of such idiocy as ploughing resources into district rugby, a format in which Scottish supporters had long since registered complete disinterest.

But we should still reflect on the fact that a decade that had dawned with a Grand Slam match – for which tickets were changing hands for hundreds of pounds – ended with the shame of tiers of empty seats at Murrayfield for the 1999 World Cup.

At least that will not be the scene at Murrayfield today, but 10,000 vacant chairs – the predicted shortfall – is still 10,000 too many at a Six Nations game.

And they will not be easily filled unless the sport’s rulers remember to engage with the sport’s grass roots again.

05 February 2006

This article was posted on 5-Feb-2006, 09:33 by Hugh Barrow.