SUNDAY HERALD REPORTS
Land of the midnight scrum

Alasdair Reid pleads for the powers-that- be to catch sanity and turn back the clock



The traffic jams were just about manageable, for even Victor Meldrew at his most curmudgeonly would have struggled to summon an iota of road rage in the trickle of cars that rolled towards Netherdale on Friday evening. Indeed, in advance of a match that unfolded as a rousing demonstration of Borders self-belief, the most confident gesture on offer was the work of the local constabulary, whose parking cones fanned out through Galashiels for such a distance you half-suspected they had heard that Elvis had chosen the place personally for his long-awaited comeback.
Midnight rugby? Not quite, but nearly. For reasons that were never fully explained, and may have owed as much to planetary alignments as Irish television schedules, the Border Reivers’ Celtic League 35-34 defeat to Leinster kicked off at the ungodly and hopelessly inconvenient time of 9pm, an arrangement made all the more jaw-droppingly bizarre by the competition’s long and well-publicised struggle to gain public affection. This was a sod-the-punters gesture of some magnitude in a context where punters have been anything but thick on the ground.

In the circumstances, which included biting cold and the fact that the mother of all rainstorms swept through the area about an hour before the start, it ranked as a considerable achievement that the Reivers drew 1,307 souls to the game, for most commentators had predicted a crowd even lower than the 702 who had turned up to watch them lose to Connacht the previous weekend. The suspicion was that ferocious marketing and the match’s undoubted novelty value combined to lever the attendance into four figures.

Strangely, the Border Telegraph previewed the event with a staged photograph of youngsters in sleeping bags outside Netherdale’s main gate, an image that might have said more about the area’s overheated housing market than any demand for tickets. Yet you could hardly fault the Reivers’ administrators for any failure to get their wider community involved, not least through the use of a public address system cranked up to the sort of eardrum-melting levels that probably brought on migraines in Kelso, Langholm and the remoter corners of the upper Yarrow valley.

It is a little known fact that Fish, the former Marillion frontman, made his first public performance in Galashiels, so it is perfectly understandable that the locals should treat innovations on the entertainment front with a certain degree of caution. But at least the Reivers made a decent fist of winning over their sceptics, delivering a performance rich in passion and feisty spirit, if maddeningly short of much-needed precision, that saw them lose by just a single point against a Leinster outfit that had knocked reigning European champions Toulouse out of the Heineken Cup only six days earlier.

Given Edinburgh’s lame rollover against a Lomu-less Cardiff, a result that virtually wiped out their last hopes of winning the Celtic League title, the Borders’ performance was warmly reassuring from a Scottish point of view. But while the Reivers pressed all the right rugby buttons on Friday evening, and while the crowd was not quite so embarrassingly low as had been predicted, it is worth bearing in mind a couple of things: one, they still lost; two, the attendance was still pitifully small.

The bar-room wisdom of those who found any of the local hostelries still open after the game will count for nothing in the deliberations of Gordon McKie, the SRU chief executive who has already noticed that Scotland’s professional teams blow a new £5 million hole in his budget every year as he struggles to find the means to reduce the governing body’s debt from its current level of somewhere close to £23 million. As hard-nosed as his reputation might be, McKie has wisely acknowledged that the SRU is ultimately judged against criteria more complex than those that stand out on a balance sheet or a profit-and-loss account, but those documents will still play a massive part in his deliberations over the next few months.

While McKie told the Sunday Herald only last week that the three professional teams are effectively safe for the time being, he also made it plain that a status quo of haemorrhaging cash could not be an option in the future. That next season will be a make-or-break time for Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Borders was starkly underlined by McKie’s reply when asked what might happen if their financial positions do not improve: “If it’s not working, despite trying, then you might decide it’s time to do something else,” he said.

All of which lends a certain urgency – and places certain obligations on those involved – to the meeting of the Celtic League’s board which will take place this week. It is generally understood that a three-year sponsorship deal with the Irish cider company Magners is now at the dotting-and-crossing stage, but anyone familiar with the ways of rugby administrators has long since also learned the truth of that old saw about not counting chickens before they hatch. The SRU meltdown that brought McKie into the organisation last year may finally have brought about a culture of realism in the Scottish game, but there are still enough unreconstructed old bufties in the committee rooms of Ireland and Wales to scupper any promising deal.

In that sense, the suspicion that the new sponsors may not have had to break the bank for the honour of attaching their name to the Celtic League should not be a matter of any great grief in the three countries affected. Granted, the sort of telephone numbers that measure the deals made in the southern hemisphere would be welcome hereabouts too, but the real significance for the Celtic League of an arrangement is the obligation it imposes on the competition organisers to deliver a product worthy of support. It is not, as JFK might have said, about what your sponsors can do for you, but what you can do for your sponsors.

And, in blunt terms, that means no more faffing about. Since its inception, the Celtic League has suffered from its standing as little more than a practice pitch for players in the test arena, and the rugby authorities of the three countries involved have all been guilty of treating the thing with something approaching contempt. If they now sign a deal that obliges them to show it some respect, to stop pulling out the best players and stop the ludicrous shuffling of kick-off times, then it will be all the better for it. Everyone involved with the competition – players, supporters and, yes, even media – deserves a regular diet of home-and-away fixtures at sensible and predictable times. Without that, it will continue to struggle.

On paper, it should work a treat. Strip away the dafter elements of its context and Friday’s game had enough lip-smacking ingredients to satisfy the palate of any rugby aficionado. It had the bristling threat of Shane Horgan and Brian O’Driscoll in the Leinster backline. It had flashes of Gregor Townsend at his darting best, not least when he scored the try that ignited the Borders’ second-half fightback. This is what the Celtic League can be and should be. But let’s have it a few hours before bedtime.

This article was posted on 9-Apr-2006, 07:40 by Hugh Barrow.