The Scotsman reports today

No place for a Renwick in the modern game, says gentleman Jim
DAVID FERGUSON

JIM Renwick is not happy when we meet. He has been looking at prams, his first granddaughter having been born this week and another grandchild expected next month.

"Have you seen the price of prams now?" he says, no hint of humour. "I could have bought a small car for that! 'Travel systems' they call them. In fact, they look like wee cars. Changed days eh?"

It certainly is. Just over 30 years ago, when BBC Grandstand had fine-tuned its move from monochrome to full colour, Renwick was beginning to excite rugby supporters of all ages and persuasions. A Hawick and Scotland centre Renwick weaved many an intricate design across rugby fields in the UK and abroad.

Renwick was that rare breed of sportsman who made the sublime seem effortless. He would swivel the hips, cut inside a defender, finding space where there had seemed none; he would make to pass wide and then twist away in the opposite direction, almost darting underneath bemused opponents. If some footballers can be difficult to dispossess, Renwick was difficult simply to lay a hand on.

He played for Scotland from 1972 until 1984, sadly missing the Grand Slam in his final year due to a knee injury picked up at Langholm Sevens in 1983. It was not one of Scottish rugby's most celebrated periods, but with others like Andy Irvine in the same team it was certainly one of the most stylish.

Frank Hadden is striving to put the national side back on an even keel, but it is no secret that he has precious few game-breakers, those gifted internationals of sheer attacking class, at his disposal. So, why are there no Jim Renwicks around now? It is worth asking Renwick himself, who remains an avid student of the game.

"There is no easy answer," he begins, "but the game of rugby is very different now to what it was in my day.

"The Jim Renwicks or whoever have gone because the game is about size and power now. I wonder the same thing when I watch club rugby, and I see lads trying to play like the professionals but without the same levels of fitness or power. In my day the game was for wee guys, big guys, fat guys, skinny guys, and we would all find our niche; if you were wee like me you'd find out how to beat the bigger ones, how to survive really.

"But now you have to be over six feet to get a game, and if you're not over 6ft 4in you'll no' be a top forward for long. The fat guys and skinny guys have found it tough to survive, so have the wee guys, and I think that's why we don't have as many people playing rugby these days."

There remains a belief in some parts, however, that players are not as skilled as they were, or that the coaching is too rigid, that too many coaches snuff out individualism in pursuit of complicated team patterns supposedly designed to fox opponents. In truth, there are more players and coaches around who yearn for a centre like Renwick to materialise.

If the coaches cannot unearth them, would the answer not lie in using the Hawick maestro to coach the young professionals? He helped Hawick to the first Scottish Cup in 1996 and then assisted Ian Barnes in steering the team to the championship in 2000. He has made odd trips up to Edinburgh to help Barnes, his former Hawick and Scotland teammate, with coaching sessions at Edinburgh Accies and has, a tad reluctantly, agreed to help out every week in the coming season as Accies bid to cope with life in Division Two.

"But," he sighs, "I'm too soft to be a coach. It's not something that I've ever really taken to. I miss playing; there's nothing like it, especially walking out the tunnel at Murrayfield and hearing the cheers as you get onto the field. Nothing could ever beat that.

"And, anyway, I can't just go onto a training field and show a player how to sidestep like I did. I maybe could, technically, but it's not the 'how' you sidestep it's the 'when' that makes the player. Knowing when to do it, which is a natural thing, instinct, is the important bit that sets players apart from others and you can't teach that. You have it or you don't. Gerald Davies, the great Welsh player, said the sidestep was the small man's retribution and he was right. I did it because I had to; I had to find a way of keeping the ball and not losing it to the big buggers. A sidestep at the right time lost them ... sometimes. But when I see a wee player trying it now I say to him 'don't be daft, give the ball to a big man who can break the line and support; be there to pick up the pieces and make your mark once he's through'.

"It's about using the talents you have, not trying to be like everyone else. The game is going the way where backs are becoming like forwards and forwards like backs. Where does it stop? Are we going to end up back in the 1920s with the first men to the scrum going into the front row? We have to remember that some players are good in some areas and not others - Jonah Lomu was great, but the All Blacks never asked him to take a last-minute drop-goal."

Renwick's mind is as sharp now as it was when he played, but as we talk, the weaves he spun on the rugby field suddenly appear an ancient tradition.Yet, unlike many of his generation, Renwick does not have a gloomy outlook. But he could, easily, as we sit in Hawick Golf Club, dark clouds closing in above the town, with the driving rain creating rivers down the fairway at Vertish Hill.

But he insists: "There's no point being gloomy, or looking back. Rugby is like any sport, it has to move on. Me and my son were watching old matches from the 70s on ESPN the other day. He wasn't alive to see it at the time, and said it was like Mickey Mouse rugby. I wanted to laugh, but I had to agree. Some of the skills in defence, kicking and passing were woeful, and some of the things I did ... oh, it wasn't all great I tell you!

"Let's not kid ourselves. Gareth Edwards, Barry John, Gerald [Davies] and Andy [Irvine] were great players - I played in a back line of Dods, Baird, Cranston, Robertson, Rutherford and Laidlaw - but we had chances to show our skill the way the game was then.

"I don't think we had more skill, just different skill for a different game and there's no point wondering what it would be like for me now, or for Chris Paterson in the 1970s, because it's not going to happen.

"The modern players are under pressure every week from August to May, or June with tours, where we had only a handful of Test matches each year and then dropped back to a standard of club rugby which varied depending on who you played. Paterson is an example of a great player now who is consistently good, although I have to say I wish they'd left him at stand-off, because I think he'd be the answer for us now."

If we felt that a trip to Hawick would bring the answer to how we inject flair into the Scotland team, Renwick admits we were mistaken. But he, at least, does not believe the remedy lies in harking back to the days of Jim Renwick, when prams were prams and rugby players couldn't defend.

This article was posted on 19-Aug-2006, 06:58 by Hugh Barrow.