Sunday Herald reports- 17 April 2005

Rugby’s ‘lost boys’ who would have flourished under the old club system
Alasdair Reid


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


THEY are the lost boys of rugby, the players failed by those running the game. Caught between the amateur and professional arms of the sport, they are too good for the former but not yet ready for the latter, so they pass their weekends in boredom, frustration and inactivity. Once in a while they might get out for a game, even just a seat on a substitutes’ bench, but more often they are paid to do nothing.
This is Scottish rugby’s dirty little secret. The SRU have a small army of development officers and their officials are happy to drone on endlessly about helping players to fulfil their potential, but that support disappears at the most critical stage of the learning process. At the very point where a player is trying to make the leap from club rugby into the full-time ranks and establish himself as a seasoned professional, the gap widens and he falls into the chasm below.

Is there anything more potty than paying rugby players not to play? The issue does not arise for the big names of the sport, but at Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Borders, Scotland’s three professional sides, there are peripheral players who are lucky if they get to play in more than half a dozen games in a season. While those cash-strapped outfits cannot muster the resources to run second teams, and while current protocols do not allow contracted players to turn out for Scottish clubs, about one third of all Scottish professionals play too rarely to maintain their match-hardness and skills.

Most alarming of all is the fact that it is young players who are most likely to be damaged, their development arrested as the opportunities to hone their talents in competitive games dry up. Those coltish 19 and 20-year-olds, who would once have been tempered into far harder ind-ividuals in the weekly furnace of competition, are pushed off rugby’s fast track and into a slow lane of full-time training for matches where they are surplus to requirements.

Others, many of them players of real quality, live in the shadows of being perm-a-subs, called on for their 20 minutes of action on an almost weekly basis. More than two months of this season had gone by before Graeme Beveridge, the peppery scrum-half with five Scotland caps to his name, made his first start for Glasgow, although he had made eight appearances as a replacement before that momentous November day.




Among the delegates from Scotland’s rugby clubs who gathered at Murrayfield to discuss the sport’s governance last weekend, there was a smug sense of achievement when the debate, with its complex sequence of motions and amendments, was concluded. But how many of them paused to consider the utter madness of a scenario in which such constitutional shenanigans as that gathering represented could come to assume greater importance and occupy more attention than the monstrous disservice that is being done to so many players?

It can never be shouted loud enough: rugby owes its players the opportunity to play and it will be to the sport’s lasting shame if those opportunities are not provided. It was perfectly understandable that fingers should be pointed at Matt Williams, the catastrophically unimpressive national coach, when only three Scottish players were selected for the Lions squad last week, but questions must be asked of the wider game as well. If Scotland’s conveyor belt of talent is so critically damaged, is it any wonder that Sir Clive Woodward chose to ignore it?

In the pre-professional era, when Scottish clubs were the primary source of inter-national players, the inter-national side were effectively the result of a process of refinement and distillation. Whatever their positions, players made it to the Test side by demonstrating their superiority over other contenders week after week, proving themselves in competitive matches. In absolute terms, the standard may have been wanting, but nothing added spice to a contest so much as knowing that there were games within games, and bitter rivalries to be decided.

Contrast that with the desperately unsatisfying situation today. Edinburgh, for instance, have a crop of wonderfully talented back-row players at the moment, but however well-meaning their attempts to give a reasonably equal share of game-time to such potential stars as Alasdair Strokosch, Alan MacDonald, Simon Cross and David Callam, the consequence is that none has had the con tinuity of regular competition that is critical to their development. All too often, players seem to hit the brakes as soon as they reach the professional ranks.

At last, though, there is evidence of some clear thinking by leading figures in both the professional and amateur ranks. Having established a protocol last year that prevented full-time contracted players from turning out for their sides, some club officials now realise the error of their ways and are keen to establish arrangements that would allow players to move between the two spheres.

“We’ve found in the past that it has been difficult to come up with a working agreement,” said Kenny Hamilton, spokesman for the Premier Rugby Forum and Glasgow Hawks.

“But I think some attempts have tended to over-complicate things by trying to address situations that are never going to arise. There’s really no need to address the issue of a top player like Simon Taylor playing in a club match, when what we’re dealing with is those fringe and young players who could benefit from regular games.

“We want an equitable and fair process for all concerned. As we’ve already seen, that might take the wisdom of Solomon to achieve, but the general principle is that we want guys playing rugby. We’ve seen enough of professional trainers.”

According to Hamilton, top clubs are now actively seeking to establish new ground rules to allow freer movement between clubs and professional sides for the relevant players, with the hope that the new procedures can be in place before the start of next season. For Steve Bates, head coach at the Borders, the change cannot come fast enough, for he has found the barriers between the sport’s two sectors to be one of the most frustrating aspects of Scotland’s current rugby scene.

“I really can’t see that it should be a problem,” said Bates. “We have a group of players who are not regular first-choice selections here, and it would help everyone concerned if they could play club matches. The clubs would get the benefit of their skills, they would retain their match fitness and we would know they were ready to go if we had to draft them back into the pro side.

“Of course, there is also a core group of players, some of them around the international squad, who will probably never play club rugby. But I think it’s important for the psychology of players outside that group that they get regular games. It would keep them motivated, because it’s in order to play the game that you want to become a better player. They are rugby players, after all, and it’s our job to give them the opportunities to play.”

There is nothing but common sense in what Hamilton and Bates are saying. For rugby needs its players – and its players need rugby.

This article was posted on 17-Apr-2005, 08:28 by Hugh Barrow.