THE SCOTSMAN REPORTS
DAVID FERGUSON CHIEF RUGBY WRITER
THE IRB World Sevens Series is unlikely to move to Melrose next year for the 125th anniversary of the game, after the agencies involved informed the Scottish Rugby Union that the proposed funding had lapsed.

The idea of hosting the event at the home of sevens rugby, which gave the game to the world in 1883, was first mooted in 2004. But after many months of negotiations to win the right to be hosts, SRU chief executive Gordon McKie announced that taking the World Sevens to the Greenyards was too great a risk. Instead, the event is to be held at Murrayfield Stadium in June this year, in the first staging of a five-year contract to hold the finale of the World Sevens Series in Scotland.

Andy Irvine, the SRU president, said this week that he remained hopeful that Melrose would host the 2008 event but time is now running out.

David Parker, the leader of Scottish Borders Council and a key figure in pulling together over £2 million of public funding for the event, admitted: "The funding has lapsed and Mr McKie has told us to wait until June for a decision on whether he might change his mind and come to Melrose [next year], but that's too late for us.

"Even if we could push it through inside a year, Mr McKie still wants us to remove the conditions which state that we all take an equal share in controlling the event. As a council under-writing the event with massive funding we can't hand over total control to a body with the financial difficulties of the SRU, especially when they are not contributing a penny.

"They would have to be equal partners and unless they shift on that we can't move forward. The other problem is that I could not put my staff through that again, unless Andy Irvine and Allan Munro [SRU chairman] were involved this time.

"We will try to explore all the options because a lot of time and effort was spent on these plans over the last few years to bring an outstanding event to the home of sevens, and we still believe it was a massive opportunity for Scottish rugby and the Borders passed up by the SRU. But something would have to change in the coming weeks, not months, to have any hope of resurrecting the plans for Melrose. It's a big event and we're still desperate for it to come to the Borders."

Under a Freedom of Information Act inquiry, The Scotsman has accessed the official correspondence regarding the event that passed between the Scottish Borders Council, the Scottish Enterprise Borders and the SRU that erupted into a furious row between the bodies in October.

The paperwork shows that current agreements for funding the Melrose event, which runs to £2.14m in total, lapsed as a result of the decision to move it to Murrayfield. Scottish Borders Council and Scottish Enterprise Borders both made it clear that they would require another 12-18 month period to be able to push the various funding proposals through local government and quango committees and properly organise an event of the stature planned, with the help of business partners EventScotland and Melrose RFC.

It is clear in the detail of the correspondence, however, that the financial controllers of at least three of these bodies believed the event would bring a small profit each year it is held - the business plan also being remarked upon by the IRB as the best they had seen for any of the world sevens tournaments.

Leading figures in the Scottish police, fire service and ambulance services were involved in the project from an early stage, advising on how to route traffic through and around the Borders to cope with as many as 20,000 people per day, which should have allayed fears at Murrayfield over how the area would cope with the strain. Temporary grandstands were to be constructed by a national firm in England, who supply major sports events across Europe including The Open and insisted there was no problem with demand for this particular occasion, while hotel chains in the Borders and Edinburgh had agreed full specifications right down to costing buckets of ice for players each night.

With the costs of every facet of the event, from the competing teams to IRB match officials, drug testers to ball-boys, tournament hospitality to civic functions and worldwide marketing all being taken up by the union's four aforementioned partners on the new company - referred to as Newco in the correspondence - the plans show the SRU as liable for nothing.

The SRU currently loses over £1m with the professional team in the Borders, and the professional game has struggled to generate interest in the local community. Hosting the World Sevens event sought to address that and, indeed, the problems of the Border Reivers, and rugby in general, were used to justify some of the funding agreed by council committees.

Melrose was to be turned into a pedestrianised 'Rugby Village' for the weekend, with giant screens among £40,000 worth of entertainment accounted for, and another £130,000 was earmarked for marketing the tournament.

Among the many initiatives agreed, each Borders town was to adopt and form links with one of the 16 competing nations, and close to £50,000 was to be spent on pushing rugby into primary and secondary schools across the region, using local club and professional players in health, fitness, PE, social awareness and anti-drugs programmes before, during and after the tournament.

The SRU has been pushing this kind of work, but it has been painfully slow to develop because of the difficulties in altering heavily-congested school curricula. Ironically, SBC had found ways to do this in the sevens plan with their 70-plus schools with a series of initiatives.

What is clear in studying the documents is that the Melrose hosting of an IRB World Sevens tournament, over the next five years, was about much more than a rugby tournament. The design, backed unanimously by councillors across the region - which, in itself, was a small miracle - had a long-term purpose to help regenerate a region, through rugby, which explains why there was such fury when McKie told the IRB he would not support it.

The concerns of McKie, an accountant brought in to Murrayfield to lower the union's £23m overdraft, lay with a fear that the money the council, enterprise body and EventScotland had signed up to provide could not be guaranteed. Because the union was to be a partner on the new company set up to host the tournament, the chief executive admitted that he feared the union could lose "more than half a million pounds" if the event was to fail. However, one source involved in the project told The Scotsman: "The problem was ignorance of the event - the SRU was not liable because the costs were underwritten by SBC, SEB and EventScotland, and the event was not going to lose anything like £500,000 a year.

"Gordon McKie insisted the sponsorship projections were halved from £200,000 to £100,000, despite £100,000 having already been lined up a year from the event, and insisted it was wrong to forecast more than 9,500 spectators a day to an event in Melrose 'in the current rugby climate'.

"I don't think he realised the actual size of the crowds which attend the Melrose Sevens every year - around 12,000 - or the fact that there is no link between Melrose attendances and poor crowds at autumn internationals at Murrayfield. And yet, we had allocated more than ten times Melrose's spend on marketing, PR and promotion. He said anything over 9,500 'didn't stack up'."

The IRB having agreed to finish the series in Scotland and Emirates Airlines similarly become title sponsor, despite the late switch of venue, McKie is now striving to find the estimated £700,000 needed to run the event at Murrayfield in June.


Comments
1. _Andy, Fife / 1:07am 4 Jan 2007
A well written article from David Ferguson, showing that it's a complicated business. Still, the important point is the where we now stand: instead of looking forward to a memorable event in Melrose with a great atmosphere, we have the prospect of an echoing Murrayfield with mostly empty seats.

Is it any wonder that the national team and the SRU are in such a mess? God help us all.

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2. Kilted Kiwi, NZ / 7:03am 4 Jan 2007
Yet again the big brother of the SRU have taken a golden opportunity and turned it into a disaster waiting to happen, Have to agree with No.1 - Melrose would have been the ideal place to host the home coming of sevens not a 1/4 full Murrayfield at best.

When will the SRU sort out their house and start to redevelop rugby in Scotland instead of the current narrow minded approach.

What will Mr. Mckie do now when he can't raise the 700k needed ?

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3. Curious, Lilliesleaf / 7:48am 4 Jan 2007
For how much longer does the rugby community in Scotland have to put up with the SRU? This appears to be a self satisfying organisation which created the huge debt that is a millstone round its neck and slowly but surely rugby in Scotland is being strangled by the same millstone. How can we break free?

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4. Houlet, Grangemouth / 8:08am 4 Jan 2007
Another "excellent" decision by the Edinburgh Rugby Football Union. The plan for Melrose was obviously flawed is it would

This article was posted on 4-Jan-2007, 08:46 by Hugh Barrow.