SUNDAY HERALD REPORTS


Scrum down
Bob Carruthers may have a point but he’s doing himself no favours, says Alasdair Reid
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GIVEN THE ample proportions of his opponent, SRU chief executive Gordon McKie would probably insist that his battle with the controversial Edinburgh owner Bob Carruthers should be billed as a catchweight contest. Yet while McKie merely tips the scales Carruthers crushes, the clash of the two men has been an unequal fight in other regards.

For while Carruthers can duck and weave in the sort of maddening, maverick fashion that has become his trademark in recent weeks, McKie is constrained by the inconvenience of holding a far wider brief than the relatively meagre responsibility of simply looking after Edinburgh. Moreover, McKie is answerable not just to his fellow members of the Scottish Rugby board, but also, ultimately, to the game in its entirety.

In which circumstances, the irksome business of dealing with Carruthers must seem about as straightforward as nailing jelly to the ceiling. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the positions taken by the two protagonists in the debate that has dominated rugby for the past two weeks, Carruthers has done neither himself nor the prospect of a speedy resolution any favours by lurching from one position to another in a whirl of contradictions.

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So it was that his terse statement, issued on Wednesday morning, to the effect that he would be keeping his counsel for the foreseeable future, had a few of the more mischievous members of the media running a book on when he would break that vow. Staggeringly, he managed to last a whole day before breaking his silence to issue yet another summons to yet another press conference to deliver yet more complaints against the SRU.

Given that McKie and the Union had softened their own stance over some of the more contentious issues the previous day, it was a less than gracious response. Yet at least there were perceptible signs of progress towards breaking the logjam that the argument had become. Hilariously, one of them involved Edinburgh renewing their membership of the SRU for the sole purpose of receiving a rap across the knuckles from the governing body, the sort of high farce that has been all too typical of the entire affair.

It no doubt satisfied Carruthers' sense of honour that the Union had blinked first, but the truth of the matter is that they had no other option. For a start, the positions they had taken on some of the core issues of the debate would have been difficult to sustain, but the prospect of many of Scotland's players gathering for a World Cup training camp under clouds of uncertainty had to be addressed. The Union were obliged to offer them at least a glimmer of hope that a resolution might be on the horizon.

For the SRU, the most frustrating aspect of all this is that they provide the lion's share of Edinburgh's funding for only a tiny slice of control. That, though, was always likely to be the case in any transition towards private financing of the professional teams, and more likelier still as Carruthers walked into a buyer's market when he turned up on the Murrayfield doorstep last year. He might have had reason to rue some aspects of the deal he struck last July, but in broad terms he still got an awful lot of team for not a lot of money.

That he was promoting himself as the exemplar for private investment last week was a little like hearing Henry VIII proclaim himself the champion of monogamy. But the fact the SRU have had their fingers burned by their involvement with the music and video entrepreneur should not dissuade them from trying to attract more investors into the sport. The most alarming statement made at Murrayfield in recent months was not uttered by Carruthers, but by McKie when he said that the Union would be reluctant to relinquish control of Glasgow after letting go of Edinburgh.

His remark brought to mind a speech by his predecessor, Phil Anderton, who stood up at the SRU's annual general meeting three years ago and declared: "The SRU cannot and will not run every part of the game in Scotland. We are the governing body. We should govern and promote, not run teams."

Those words should be carved into the lintels of Murrayfield, but the worry is that Carruthers' way of doing business is unlikely to do much hasten their realisation.

Indeed, the whispering from within Murrayfield has often seemed to have been aimed at discrediting Carruthers altogether. The nudges and winks have suggested that he may have had trouble squaring the circle of his business plan due to a failure to attract high-profile concerts to the stadium, the rights to which he acquired last year as part of the Edinburgh deal.

Yet as Carruthers seems to divide his life between a Caribbean retreat and his suite at one of Edinburgh's top hotels, his is a degree of penury most of us could just about handle.

Carruthers also makes a perfectly valid point with his argument that the Union do not have a vision for professional rugby in Scotland. In the dozen years that have passed since the introduction of pay-for-play, I cannot recall a single instance of an SRU figure of any note suggesting that a tier of professional rugby might have some merit in its own right, beyond its role as a rung on the ladder to the international game. Until the governing body embrace that concept, a development that will involve an acceptance of the autonomy of the sides and far less interference in their running, tension and acrimony will reign.

And after all, it is not as if the Union's stewardship of these teams was any sort of advertisement for state control. Over the past few months, central ownership has seen the Borders put out of action and Glasgow scuttled back to the unloved Firhill. In which light, it is perversely easy to hail Edinburgh as the success story of the Scottish game.

This article was posted on 15-Jul-2007, 07:32 by Hugh Barrow.