SUNDAY HERALD REPORTS

Keep all three pro sides to supply the national team, but give them a Celtic League that’s really meaningful, says Alasdair Reid



IF Scotland’s recent international successes were meant to provide a springboard for the country’s domestic sides, there was a distinct lack of bounce about Glasgow and the Borders when they returned to Celtic League action on Friday evening. Glasgow were sunk 31-3 by Cardiff Blues in the Arms Park slurry, while the Borders had an even more uncomfortable experience in Netherdale’s driving rain as they went down 9-11 to Connacht before a crowd of just 702.
Those results represented a chill blast of rugby reality after the heady excesses of the Six Nations season. Moreover, the attendance at the Borders match was a declaration of public indifference, a repudiation of the notion that Scotland had fallen in love with the sport again. Even allowing for all the mitigating factors of weather and the fact the Borders had not played a home game for almost three months, it was a worrying occasion.

To some extent, Steve Bates, the Borders coach, had appeared to anticipate problems when he spoke on Thursday of the need to maintain a third force in Scottish professional rugby. Of course, an element of self-interest might influence Bates’ thinking, but he made a persuasive case for the maintenance of the domestic status quo in response to suggestions that the easiest way for the SRU to reduce their debt burden would be to put his side out of action.

“We’ve established that the only way forward for Scottish rugby is to have a competitive national team,” Bates said. “You get that with strong cooperation with the professional sides and with healthy competition for places. For that to happen, you have to have as many Scottish qualified guys playing professional rugby as you can.

“If you shut down one team you might make a short-term saving, but the long-term future is put under threat. The Six Nations has been a fantastic boost for that argument. What happened in the championship was the result of three professional teams working together to produce one national team. What Scotland achieved supports the case for having three teams.”

Bates’s logic is sound in a rugby sense, but it has no commercial parallel. Scottish rugby’s rulers have long cherished the idea that international success has a trickle-down effect, generating interest and involvement at the sport’s grass roots. It seems almost cruel to point out that not a shred of evidence exists to support their pet theory.

A winning Scotland team will draw a crowd to itself, not push it anywhere else. On top of which it is worth remembering that during Scotland’s most successful international era – from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s – participation levels nosedived. It is about time that the myth of the Scotland team being the engine room of the sport’s wider development was well and truly buried.

Scotland coach Frank Hadden has demonstrated an instinctive appreciation of the importance of autonomy to the country’s professional sides by taking a hands-off approach to their affairs that has been in sharp and effective contrast to the endless meddling of his predecessor, Matt Williams. And it is about time that the sport’s officials in Scotland, Ireland and Wales took his lead by demonstrating in deed as well as word that the Celtic League is a valid competition in its own right, not simply a development tool for their international sides.

The coming and going of top players and the stop-start nature of the competition as a whole have diminished the impact of the Celtic League since its inception. Fundamentally, in identifying the best domestic side from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the Celtic League answers a question that nobody had ever been bothered to ask in the past, a drawback that will only be overcome when its organising unions set it free from their own narrow requirements. Goodness knows, it might even be able to shake off the embarrassment of being the only significant competition in world rugby that has never been able to attract a title sponsor.

None of which, it must be said, seemed to bother Edinburgh lock Alastair Kellock one bit as he looked ahead to his side’s clash with the Ospreys in Swansea this afternoon. Even if the return of Nathan Hines from international exile restricted his participation in the Six Nations, the tournament established Kellock in the front rank of international players, levering him away from that peripheral status signalled by the fact that all his caps before the championship had been won as a replacement. Yet having returned to the bench for the matches against Ireland and Italy, Kellock has a freshness that may not be shared by all his international colleagues at the moment.

“I’m raring to get a start again,” said the towering 24-year-old, whose 6ft 8in frame is a reminder of that pre-lifting era of lighthouse locks in the early 1990s. Indeed, Kellock’s athleticism is such that he could probably get along quite nicely without the assistance of a forklift prop, but he slotted in superbly when he came on for Scott Murray against Italy last weekend, immediately seeming to cure the ills of a Scottish lineout that had begun to creak again.

“I’ve not played much rugby over the last couple of weeks,” he said. “Some people might think it would be difficult to get back to club rugby after the Six Nations, but it’s not a comedown in the slightest. Because of the position we’re in at the moment, with a really good chance of winning the league, it’s exciting to be back in the squad with a group of guys I’ve known for a long time now.”

A win in Wales would be a powerful reassertion of Edinburgh’s title credentials after the disappointment of their much-weakened selection going down 23-31 to Ulster at Murrayfield last month. It would also be an endorsement of acting head coach Todd Blackadder’s decision to bring his international players back en masse, with no fewer than 10 of the starting line-up against the Ospreys having been on duty with the Scotland squad in Rome’s Stadio Flaminio last weekend.

Kellock acknowledged the potential problems when players come back to claim their slots, but suggested they can be dealt with. “In the past couple of Six Nations, I’ve been on the other side of things, guys have been coming back to where I was, not the other way around,” he said. “It can be difficult because there are a lot of guys not getting a start, but you just have to deal with that. People have been dealing with it for years, so it’s not like it’s the first time it has happened.”

And after years of seasons petering out in disappointment, he has a real relish for what the next few weeks could deliver for his side: “The main thing for us is where we are in the league, and the opportunity we have to win it this time round. The guys are excited by that.

“Coming back into a position where you could win this league helps you to focus on what you have to do. Of course, you think about Scotland and summer tours and things, but they have to be on the back burner at the moment. It’s a pretty exciting time all round.”

26 March

This article was posted on 26-Mar-2006, 08:16 by Hugh Barrow.