Sunday Herald - 10 April 2005
Time to end the introspection and move on
Alasdair Reid believes the key issues facing the SRU should not include any petty backbiting

Leafing through the agenda for today’s SRU special general meeting at Murrayfield, with its 12 dense pages of motions and amendments and explanatory notes, you half expect to stumble across a proposal for a working party to investigate the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers or a sub-committee to look into the issue of balancing angels on the head of a pin.
That such questions will not be addressed at this, only the fifth mass gathering of the great and the good and the pathologically long-winded of Scottish rugby in little more than a year, is probably more a matter of oversight than genuine sympathy for those of us whose wills to live have been sorely tested by this parade of constitutional tomfoolery.

Which is not to mock the process as a whole, nor to question the notion that rugby’s future wellbeing is inextricably linked to the debates and deliberations that will unfold in Murrayfield’s cavernous President’s Suite today, rather to offer a reminder that the jaw-jawing of a bunch of blokes in blazers should only ever be considered an unfortunate adjunct to the administration of the sport, and not its central purpose.

That trifling consideration appears to have been overlooked in the wars of words whose ordnance has clouded rugby’s horizon with a fog of obfuscation since the dramatic events unleashed in January when the SRU’s general committee, in a flabbergastingly pompous outbreak of utter pigheadedness, chose to undermine the standing of David Mackay, the man they had appointed as SRU board chairman, with the vote of no confidence that led, inevitably, to his resignation.

The committee, a body of men whose actions suggest origins in the shallower regions of the gene pool, has failed repeatedly either to justify their move or dispel the overwhelming suspicion that their vote owed everything to narrow self-interest rather than the welfare of the wider game.

That they did not, as they claimed at the time, have the mandate of the clubs they represent became apparent within days of their coup; that they are less thegovernors of the game than a festering sore on its rump has become more and more obvious in the weeks and months since.

Yet acceptance of the central constitutional plank of today’s meeting – the establishment of a single governing body that has both popular mandate and effective executive powers – and rejection of the risibly ludicrous attempts of sections of the old committee to cling to the perks of the past, will not be enough to cure the ills that beset Scottish rugby at the moment.

That point cannot be stressed too strongly, for in this season of institutional navel-gazing and endless introspection it has been all too easy for the sport, quite literally, to take its eye off the ball.

It is, of course, self evident that rugby requires sound government and efficient administration, but to listen to some of the pronouncements of the past few months you might be led towards thinking that those elements define the central health of the sport.

Personally, I prefer to look to playing numbers, spectator enthusiasm and international results as measures of the current state of Scotland as a rugby nation, but I’ll concede that these things don’t have the scope for bitterness and splenetic debate that has characterised the arguments that will continue at Murrayfield today.

True, the best place to bury the hatchet in the aftermath of a vote that will bring an end to the SRU’s old committee might be between the shoulder-blades of some of its outgoing members, but the admittedly under standable hope that certain individuals never darken the Murrayfield doorstep again cannot become the overwhelming issue for the game. Indeed, without downgrading their significance entirely, there has been a depressing familiarity about some of the score- settling arguments concerning the formation of the Scottish Rugby Council, when that body will be virtually powerless anyway.

We are entitled to be optimistic about the prospect of delegates to today’s meeting exercising their collective common sense, for most of them have been blessedly remote from the vitriol that has fuelled the arguments of the past few months.

They will, almost certainly, usher in the new Rugby Board and a brave new era for the game, and wave goodbye to the blazered buffoonery of the past.

But if we are celebrating their wisdom this evening, we should do so with moderation. Because if today marks the end of a difficult period for Scottish rugby, the future is no less challenging.

This article was posted on 10-Apr-2005, 08:47 by Hugh Barrow.