Turning up heat on youths
IAIN MORRISON
THE modern rugby roundabout may slow but it rarely grinds to a halt so just as one international tournament finishes another one is about to kick off. Sure enough the 26-strong Scotland under-19 squad leaves today for the World Championships in Dubai where they will acclimatise to the 35-plus degrees heat before the tournament proper takes place from April 4-21.

The squad is captained by Dundee HSFP's fly-half Cameron Ferguson and coached by Peter Wright but if Scotland fans are expecting the youngsters to emulate their Six Nations heroes then they are likely to be disappointed. Ahead of these World Championships, the U-19 side has a record of played four, lost four and if two of the defeats were by narrow margins, both Wales and England gave Wright's team a painful lesson in finishing.

The teams in Dubai are split into two pools of 12 with Scotland in the senior one. But the team that finishes last in Pool A is automatically relegated to Pool B and avoiding that ignominy is Wright's number one priority. The Scots must face Wales, Australia and Japan in the opening round robin of matches where the odd bonus point can mean the difference between success and failure. Wright explains that a lack of planning means that Scotland inevitably experiences more of the former than the latter at this level.

"What is coming back to haunt us is that the level of rugby our boys are playing is not preparing them to play U-19 internationals," says the former Scotland prop. "People perhaps think that U-19 rugby is not a high level but many of the teams we play against field full-time professionals and even Italy gets their players together for weeks rather than days at a time.

"If we are brutally honest we have probably paid lip service to the U-19s over the last four or five years. With the systems we have in place at the moment, we are not going forward whereas most other countries are making huge strides.

"I have put in a plan to Gordon McKie that requests access to the players for four separate weeks with a match at the end of each week. If you only get them for a day all you are doing is reinforce the message of the previous get-together."

Wright argues that Scotland needs their best young players to be playing as high a standard of rugby as possible and suggests that back-up teams or academy teams could be the answer. But most importantly the coach acknowledges that the nation's most promising players need to be identified at a much earlier age so they can be given the necessary conditioning advice, a crucial step if Scotland is to compete against the best in the world.

"We have guys in the U-19 squad who are on their first year of weights. England and Wales have players who have done four, maybe five years of weights. The new pathway development managers have been put in place to address this problem. They are supposed to identify the best players at the age of 13 or 14 so that by the time we get them in the U-19 squad they'll be in their third or fourth year of strength and conditioning.

"In terms of skills levels or our understanding of the game we're probably as good as any team we play. Our big problem is strength and conditioning: the opposition is much bigger than us."

Last week's appointment of Henry Edwards to head-up player development was welcomed by Wright and the former Edinburgh forwards' coach probably has the most important job in Scottish rugby right now, with the possible exception of Frank Hadden. Edwards must shake up the criminally under-resourced professional academies, ensure the area institutes are fully utilised and decide what to do with the sevens squad. If Wright and the rest of the age-group coaches are still complaining a few years down the line, then Edwards will have failed.

There are still a few reasons to hope that the coming weeks may not end in ignominy for the young Scots as they apply sun cream rather than deep heat in the middle of the desert. To date, Wright has been unable to pick from a full-strength squad - against Wales 11 players were hors de combat, including two who broke down during the warm up. Now the coach has his best 26 players available and he rates them higher than last year's squad which finished in tenth place.

"To be brutally honest, of the 26 players we had last year there was only about 15 or 16 who deserved to be there," said the straight-talking coach. "This season the squad is stronger and if there was some sort of Olympic qualifying standard then 23 or 24 of the guys would be there by rights."

If that sounds bad news for the other two or three who are not up to scratch, it is only typical of Wright, whose mother tongue is brutal honesty - indeed it is something of a surprise that he doesn't name them. Instead he concentrates on the positives, with Ferguson, Stewart's-Melville winger David McCall and Hawick centre Graham Hogg - set to spend his summer in New Zealand on a scholarship - all tipped to make their mark in Dubai.

So too is Wright and his own inimitable version of tough love. Had high school year books been in vogue when he was a kid, he would surely have been voted the man least likely to become a professional coach, not least because he was still a teenager when he received two of the three red cards he attracted in his career.

But not only is he a coach but a successful one at that. After taking Murrayfield Wanderers from National One to Premier Two, Wright made his name with Glasgow Hawks for whom heroic failure had been a way of life. Their new coach was as blunt as the anvil he used to work at in his days as a blacksmith and he bullied, berated and blasphemed the Glasgow underachievers into winning two consecutive titles.

The U-19 job, funded by Sportscotland, fell into his lap and while the angry man has mellowed at the margins, some habits die hard. The photographer suggests that he descend two flights of stairs to have his photo taken, Wright suggests the photographer makes the trip instead. There is a rumour at Murrayfield that he ruffles so many feathers that the former prop has a standard apology letter on his office computer which is printed out on a regular basis with only the details changing. That he flies to Dubai with a squad of teenagers today says much for the trusting nature of Scottish parents, although naturally enough he demurs.

"It is a bit of a myth that I was some sort of beast," claims Wright. "I wasn't too bad when I played. I was probably overly aggressive at times but I think it was more about passion.

"It's the same with my coaching; I am a very, very passionate guy. You can get a lot over with a bit of passion, it's a massive weapon to have.

"I think you can become too dispassionate like Matt Williams when he came in and claimed that you can't win on passion: I disagree. Scotland has done that for years. All the games I played for Scotland we were very rarely a better team on paper but we proved time and again that we were a good team and that was down to playing with passion."

Wright has often been called an "animal" and so he is but probably not the rabid attack dog that his detractors would have you believe. Rather his ability to reinvent himself, to change according to his needs, marks him out as something of a chameleon. In his career he has been jester, occasionally a joke, pantomime baddy (oh no he isn't, oh yes he is) and the real thing, club, test and pro-team player. Against all expectations, he has emerged on the other side of a turbulent career as a respected coach with ambitions to get a toe hold in the professional game.

At every stop he has adapted to the demands of the job - who is to say that evolution of Peter Wright has ended.

Scotland's squad for the IRB Under-19 World Championship in Dubai, April 4-21:

Forwards: Alan Dymock (Dundee HSFP), Nick Hart (Watsonians), Frazer Wilford (Sheffield Hallam University), Pat McArthur (West of Scotland), Ross McCallum (Ardrossan Academicals), Gordon Reid (Ayr), Daniel Levison (Dundee HSFP), Graeme McGilchrist (Watsonians), Steven Turnbull (Stirling County), Richard Vernon (Stewart's Melville FP), Ross McDonald (Glasgow Hawks), Willie Lipp (Ellon), Roddy Grant (Gala).

Backs: Cameron Ferguson (Dundee HSFP, captain), Colin Goudie (Stewart's Melville FP), Ross Curle (Hillhead/Jordanhill), David Lambert (Loughborough University), David McCall (Edinburgh Gunners, Stewart's Melville FP), Alex Grove (Rugby School), Andrew Easson (Edinburgh Gunners, Stewart's Melville FP), Calum Anderson (Peebles), Jamie Hunter (Hillhead/Jordanhill), Jack Cuthbert (Bath), Graham Hogg (Hawick), Richard Mill (Stirling County), Murray Bringhurst (Watsonians).

This article was posted on 26-Mar-2006, 09:13 by Hugh Barrow.