SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY REPORTS

Where the streets are paved with gold
IAIN MORRISON
ASKING one of the RFU's talking heads about the possibility of a Magners League franchise operating in or around London, the press officer in question answers with the weariness of a man who has heard it all before.

"We have not received any formal request to set up such a franchise and until we do we can't comment." He had the party line off pat. Was there anything else by way of background information he could offer?

"Look," he said with ill-disguised impatience, "it was the Welsh last year, before that it was the South Africans who were going to start up a London team and now it's the Scots. It's just this year's story."

He may be right. Plans by London Welsh to play Magners League matches at Brentford's football stadium have come to naught and the South African venture never really got off the ground, but the RFU spokesperson might have been a little hasty in dismissing the Scottish venture quite so quickly. If it fails it won't be for the want of effort being put into the ground-breaking idea.

SRU chief executive Gordon McKie flew down to London last Tuesday and met not one but several separate parties interested in setting up just such a franchise in or around the capital city.

It is easy to understand why. Greater London has a population of 13 million odd and approximately 500,000 of them think of themselves as Scots. Add to that number a host of Welsh and Irish exiles who would flock to see a local team play when Munster or Cardiff come to town and suddenly the financial prospects for any Magners team in the south-east of England look positively mouth-watering.

Naturally enough there will be more hurdles than Colin Jackson encountered in his entire career and chief among them is the RFU. As the governing body of rugby in England, Twickenham surely has the power and the motivation to kibosh the project before it gets past the planning stage? Well, not if you listen to Martyn Thomas, chairman of the hugely influential RFU management board.

"I can't speak on behalf of the board," Thomas said last week when the idea of a Mangers League franchise was first floated, "because it has not sat down and discussed the idea. But from a personal perspective I think it would be a good idea."

"Doubtless there are those in England who will not agree with me but I think it would be beneficial to Scotland and to England.

"It doesn't do us any good to beat Scotland by 50 points every year, that doesn't fill stadiums and it doesn't sell television rights. We need Scotland to succeed because that benefits everyone."

Thomas takes the enlightened view that some of his fellow countrymen may not share but helping your oldest adversary has an interesting precedence. Back in 1997, Microsoft took a $150 million stake in Apple which was seen, at least in part, as keeping any anti-trust (monopolies) legislation at bay. Microsoft needed competition to maintain its own standards and any Englishman who can see past his own nose knows that Northern Hemisphere rugby needs the Scots to stay strong, the benefit being a competitive Six Nations, a competition that still bankrolls the entire sport in Europe.

While some of their clubs might not like the competition afforded by a Mangers League franchise on their doorstep, Thomas is phlegmatic on the possibility: "Fans will always vote with their feet."

Rather than a start-up venture, the Union and any interested parties would most likely look at reversing into a ready made vehicle, a club that already exists in the national leagues, with decent facilities or the space to develop them. Once the vehicle has been bought the team can be brought up to the National One of the English leagues, a sufficient standard to enable the club to play a development role in hot-housing some of Scotland's best young players, with no technical objection from the RFU, Premier One Rugby or the IRB.

Meanwhile, the various hoops that would require negotiating could be addressed before an application was made to enter a franchise into the Magners League. This would need not only the say so of the RFU but also agreement from the Irish and Welsh unions.

The benefits of being within close proximity to a huge population density are obvious, especially one that has embraced professional rugby like a long lost brother. The team would be close to London's five airports, offering cheap links to Ireland and Scotland, and the M4 would enable bus travel to all the matches in Wales. The south-eastern franchise would be bussing to four matches against just two cheap travel days for the Scottish teams as it is.

One obvious route into the London market is to subsidise that long-standing outpost of excellence, London Scottish. The exile club is currently sitting second in London One with a fighting chance of promotion to National Three next season. This plan has the benefit of growing something organically, but it generates more than a few problems.

London Scottish no longer own their half of the lease on the Richmond Athletic Ground and are simple tenants to Richmond Rugby, several of whose senior members bought the lease from the London Scottish receivers after Tony Tiarks collapsed the club. This means that every penny of bar profits goes to the Richmond members, a real drawback to prospective investors hoping to tap the corporate hospitality market.

In addition the ground is hopelessly unsuitable for professional rugby and the owners, the Crown Estates, are unlikely to sanction the necessary development to bring it up to scratch. And all this supposes that London Scottish are ready to go professional again after being burnt by Tiarks first time round. But the fact remains that the SRU is taking the option seriously because, as one Murrayfield insider put it last week, "the current professional set-up in Scotland simply isn't working, we have to try something else."

The SRU's financially precarious position means that both remaining unfranchised teams are now up for sale on the understanding that they can be moved anywhere, London included. The problem is that the deal must be done by the end of the Scottish Rugby's financial year in April. Unless a sale is concluded, and there are interested parties on both sides of the Border, the current review of professional rugby seems increasingly likely to conclude that the Union should axe one of the current pro-teams and put the resources into the other one. The question remains, which club is sacrificed?

Glasgow has the makings of a decent side, albeit one that lacks any strength in depth, while the Borders have the best facilities outside of Murrayfield. It may be that both sides will be merged and end up playing somewhere entirely different; Falkirk, Stirling and Perth all boast soccer grounds that could be adapted.

When deciding where to situate the club the authorities have to keep just one thing in mind, where would the club attract the most fans? This, after all, is why the SRU is looking at London in the first place.

This article was posted on 25-Feb-2007, 08:55 by Hugh Barrow.