SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY REPORTS
IAIN MORRISON
THE landscape of Scottish rugby will look significantly different after a crucial meeting to be held this coming Thursday. The SRU's executive board convenes on that day and Gordon McKie will come armed with realistic budgets that the various heads of department have drawn up. The chief executive was brought in to balance the books, so that is what he will do.

Up until now McKie has been reacting to the problems that were bequeathed to him by umpteen years of financial mismanagement. This meeting is the first chance for the Union's boss to show his hand and difficult decisions will need to be made. As McKie stated last week, Scottish rugby cannot afford to continue to do everything that it currently does and, yet again, the future of the third pro-team will almost certainly come up in discussions. Scotland should keep three teams for next season but the board may hint at an uncertain future unless they start attracting more spectators.

Funding for the women's game and some age group teams are also understood to be at risk as well as the future of the Scotland Sevens squad. SRU spokesperson Dee McIntosh admitted that the Union's recent reticence about Melrose joining the IRB's sevens' circuit was as much about the cost of maintaining a permanent sevens squad as it was about the potential to lose money by hosting the IRB event.

When asked whether the cost considerations mentioned in an SRU press release last week referred to the actual event or the sevens squad itself, McIntosh answered, "a little bit of both", before harking back to the Union's perilous financial position.

"Something, somewhere has to give," she said, "although that is not to suggest that sevens has already been axed. That decision will be made by the executive board on April 27."

Most commentators took the Union's less than enthusiastic response to the IRB announcement that Melrose was a potential candidate for their international sevens circuit as an inevitable consequence of being faced with the costs involved in staging the event. Melrose would need temporary seating to hold as many as 30,000 spectators and there are numerous other expenses involved.

But the true costs of holding the tournament are more manageable than is commonly feared. An IRB spokesman pointed out that the game's governing body picked up "a large chunk" of the costs involved, paying for the accommodation and travel of the competing teams. Most of the eight tournaments on the current IRB circuit make money and those that don't, presumably the likes of Los Angeles, do important missionary work.

The risk of losing money by hosting an IRB event at Melrose would be minimal with the right sponsors on board and a following wind. The club tournament manages to attract between 10-15,000 spectators depending upon the weather so, with temporary stands in place and well over 100 years of history to back them, it should be relatively easy for Melrose to attract the 25-30,000 spectators that allow Dubai to turn a small profit. But McIntosh admitted that in the event that Murrayfield does away with Scotland's sevens squad then it was extremely unlikely that the IRB would pursue its plan to offer Melrose a prestigious spot in their calendar with the resulting boost to the local economy that that would entail.

Even beyond the immediate impact on Melrose, there are good arguments in favour of maintaining a presence in the short game. The IRB effectively subsidises the sevens circuit - only their generosity allows countries like Kenya to compete on the world stage. This subsidy means that for every pound that the SRU spends on running a sevens squad, rumoured to be in the region of £250,000 every year, it is effectively getting at least two, maybe three, pounds of development bang for its buck. Against that, some inside Murrayfield feel that too few players emerge from the sevens squad as fully formed professionals.

Furthermore, the Scotland sevens squad may not fit in with Frank Hadden's plans for player development. As this paper explained some weeks ago, the national coach wants to take large numbers of apprentices, perhaps 44 in all, out of the club game to have them play in back-up squad matches. The rugby academies will probably be among the few winners to emerge from the budget shakeup, winning greater funding to manage these youngsters because, after a successful championship, Hadden has the ear of the chief executive.

In the absence of any other rugby voice at the middle of Murrayfield, McKie relies heavily upon the national coach for his knowledge of the game, although another appointment is overdue. In the immediate aftermath of the Six Nations tournament, McKie insisted that the post of an elite high performance director would be advertised in the coming weeks and an appointment made in the summer but so far there has been no sign of any such move. Perhaps Hadden has one eye on the post for himself after next year's World Cup?

This article was posted on 23-Apr-2006, 07:38 by Hugh Barrow.