SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY REPORTS

Cry freedom for the Murrayfield Three
RICHARD BATH
GORDON McKie is very good at saving money, but in a sport where consensus is currently as rare as a camera-shy politician, there is one thing most people can agree on: that he isn't so hot when it comes to the vision thing.

A manic preoccupation with the bottom line was understandable in the days when a downward financial spiral threatened the SRU's existence. Yet while there is still an urgent need to keep an eye on the P&L, there is also a palpable sense that this is a watershed, a time to take some fundamental decisions based on considerations other than financial expediency.

On that basis, here's our contribution to the bank of blue sky thinking. Why doesn't the SRU do only what it was created to do - nothing more, nothing less?

It's easy to forget, but the SRU was set up to foster the game and to field a national team. The SRU was not set up to run professional rugby clubs. Indeed, in the past dozen years or so, it has made such an almighty mess of doing so that it has devastated its core business as disgruntled punters have disengaged in droves.

The Union is unfortunate that its constituency is smaller than England's or Wales', and that the debt from building Murrayfield has been an albatross, but people are no longer interested in pleas of mitigation. The headline fact is that, in the dozen years since the game went "open", the SRU's stewardship of professional rugby has been so disastrous that the bank of goodwill has run dry. Its recent conduct has further strengthened the increasingly widespread perception that the SRU itself is the problem.

The issue is why the SRU feels it should own professional rugby teams. Only one comparable northern hemisphere nation has such a system, and the game in Ireland - as with Australia, New Zealand and South Africa - does not have to compete with football. In Japan, France, Wales, England and Italy, rugby has been powered forward by entrepreneurs investing huge sums (over £200m in England, where the Leicester Tigers now turn over more than the SRU). Sometimes that has caused friction, but in each of those nations the game is vibrant and viable, and based around community clubs building from the bottom up, not the top down.

Forget Ireland. Their's is a one-off success story founded on the lack of a debt burden and a generation of exceptional players who could disappear as easily as England's World Cup-winning side. The attempt to ape their system has been a disaster from Day One.

What the SRU must do is to become the turkey that votes for Christmas. The ministry for control freakery now has to walk away voluntarily from a business which it has never run competently and let others take over. And, despite constant briefings to the contrary, there are others who seek that opportunity: both the Borders and Glasgow could already have been hived off if the Union was so inclined.

The truth is that franchising was forced on a Union that never wanted it. I was one of the group of journalists told by McKie that the Union would never franchise the pro-teams less than a year before he was forced to offload Edinburgh.

For many of us, the feeling that the Union has never embraced the idea of loosening its grip has been borne out by the Edinburgh experience. Bob Carruthers will never make a fortune from rugby, yet he has been treated like a carpetbagger. He's far from blameless in the embarrassing public spat with McKie, yet the root cause of the fall-out is Carruthers' belief that, far from seeing him as a partner in a shared enterprise who must be helped at every turn, the Union are intent on screwing him out of every penny. He may have a point if his version of events regarding Heineken Cup funds is upheld if/when it comes to court.

Whether it's the World Cup Sevens fiasco or crass efforts to stymie the players' dinner, this is a centralising Union that continues to thirst for power. Even now McKie is explicit in his intention of clinging on to control of Glasgow. It's not because there are no suitable buyers because that is not the case. Why then?

Part of the answer lies in every bureaucratic organisation's need to justify its continued existence in its current form. Another part of the answer is the worryingly abrasive manner that led McKie to sneeringly denigrate Carruthers' attempts to market Edinburgh to a jaded public.

A further key reason for clinging on to its ownership of pro-teams lies with Frank Hadden. Potential franchisers have been questioned so rigorously on the question of player welfare that some have wondered whether they're taking on a creche or a rugby club. That undoubtedly comes from the national coach, who has McKie's ear and uses the access to push an agenda revolving almost exclusively around the national side's performance.

Perhaps Hadden should be applauded for that because his job is to get Scotland winning now. But the pro-teams upon which his successors will rely to produce internationalists need to field their crowd-pulling stars today if they are ever to become financially viable. This year virtually no Springboks or All Blacks have played Super 14 rugby; crowds have plummeted and show no signs of recovering. The All Blacks may win the World Cup, but at what cost?

People under pressure rarely respond by delegating more even when it has been proved that a Soviet-style central control simply doesn't work. A good example is the deal that has taken Dougie Hall to the Union's last remaining pro-side, Glasgow, who already have hookers Ross Ford and Fergus Thomson on their books. It has Hadden's fingerprints all over it and it is madness.

The way ahead is clear. The SRU's job is to run the stadium itself, and the national team - and thanks to IRB regulations it will always have sufficient access to whichever players it wants - and to concentrate on developing the game's grass-roots. Were it simply to funnel Heineken Cup money, Magners League cash and a sensible fee for the use of international players straight to independently-owned pro-teams, it would be able to shed many of the 150 or so non-playing staff currently on the Union pay-roll.

Equally importantly, it would infuse the professional game with some of the entrepreneurial funds and energy it so badly needs. The Union could also begin to reverse its damaging dislocation from the constituency it was set up to serve and upon which its survival ultimately depends.

Doing nothing is not an option. The mass exodus of top players this summer proved that. Finally peering out into the real commercial world may not work, it may already be too late, but it's preferable to the death of Scotland's pro-game by a thousand cuts. The Union has definitively proved it can't run the pro game north of the Border; it's time for them to let go.

RICHARD BATH

This article was posted on 29-Apr-2007, 06:48 by Hugh Barrow.