THE HERALD REPORTS

Shadows before a strong menace
NEIL DRYSDALE at Old Anniesland
Glasgow Hawks 7 - 14 Watsonians

Glasgow was certainly a throbbing hub of activity on Saturday. At Queen Street Station, the taxi queues milled around the black hacks like wasps at a jam factory; around Hampden and Celtic Park, Robbie Williams and Scottish football fans took the chance to swing while their heroes were winning: and the cars were bumper-to-bumper along the Great Western Road.
As for Anniesland, meanwhile, well let us merely conclude that the excitement wasn't so great. Or, more honestly, it was non-existent.
Reams have already been written about the devastation wrought to Caledonian club rugby by the SRU, in the interests of fostering their unloved professional teams - all of whom lived down to expectations again this weekend - but the point can't be reinforced sharply enough that the grassroots scene is dying and the crowds, most of them closer to 60 in age than 20, aren't so much slipping away as finding alternative pleasures, such as visiting IKEA.
In the process, Glasgow Hawks are a shadow of the team which has dominated the championship in recent seasons, while even Watsonians, efficient as their pack was, hardly set pulses racing in recording an easy victory.
What can't be denied, however, is that the quality of this so-called Premiership is at best mediocre. As a one-time SRU employee and the current director of rugby at Hawks, John Roxburgh is ideally placed to assess the situation and he was brutally candid after his club's second successive reverse.
"Neither of the sides out there are world-beaters, and I think it is already clear there has been a drop in standards this year, partly because of the SRU's decision not to release their pro team players for club matches, which is disgraceful, given that they keep asking us to build bridges with them, and yet it all seems to be one-way at the moment," said Roxburgh.
"If the union doesn't reverse this policy, then guys are effectively being paid for sitting on their backsides, keeping benches warm. That just does not make sense when Murrayfield is attempting to deal with a £23m overdraft. I actually feel a bit sorry for the lads who are being courted by the pro set-ups - they have to be encouraged in their ambitions - but we have lost 30 class players to the districts in the last seven or eight years and nobody can continue to thrive when we are receiving nothing in return."
Lest anyone imagine that Roxburgh was whingeing in defeat, he was quick to highlight Watsonians' supremacy and praised the continuing excellence of the visitors' player-coach, Cammy Mather - "You never get less than 100% from that man" - which epitomised the stakhanovite approach of these personnel, who have conceded just seven points in their first couple of fixtures.
Straight from the outset, they established control, and with Hawks forced to defend for sustained periods, it was nigh inevitable that transgressions would occur.
When they did, Mike Ker proved as accurate with the boot as Scott Stumbles had been profligate against Ayr the previous week, and while the Edinburgh men held only a
9-0 advantage at the interval, they already looked to have laid the foundations for a notable success, whereas it was difficult to recall a Hawks line-up so lacking in spark, or edge, or street wisdom.
Certainly, they couldn't be faulted for effort, but Watsonians possessed greater menace in the likes of Stumbles, Matt Coupar and Andrew Skeen and the latter duly highlighted his acceleration when he ripped through the home cover, early in the second half, and effectively sealed the outcome with a scintillating try. Although the Hawks coach, David Wilson, rung the changes, the pattern remained constant, in which light, it was predictable when the industrious Will Rowley polished off a juggernaut attack by his forwards as Watsonians threatened to record another clean sheet. That they were ultimately denied by an opportunistic incision from replacement scrum-half, Richard McKnight, with Mike Adamson converting, was nothing more than scant consolation for the hosts.

This article was posted on 4-Sep-2006, 07:11 by Hugh Barrow.