SUNDAY HERALD REPORTS
By Alisdair Reid
Major changes are needed to stop the Celtic clubs falling even further behind their English counterparts
Comment
ANDY ROBINSON said his Edinburgh team had been "bullied", a remark that erred only on the side of understatement as an assessment of their 39-0 Heineken Cup hammering by Leicester at Welford Road last weekend. Had Leicester shown a more sadistic streak, a scoreline embarrassingly close to three figures could easily have measured the scale of the Scots' humiliation at the famous old East Midlands ground.

Such was the apparent gulf in class between the two sides. But inviting as it was to conclude that a hiding had been inevitable for Edinburgh against a side with the muscle-bound belligerence of Martin Corry, Lewis Moody and Martin Castrogiovanni, a little arithmetic planted a much more troubling thought. True, Leicester had quality aplenty in a pack that contained six international players, but Edinburgh should surely have offered more resistance as a matching half-dozen of their own forwards had also breathed the rarefied air of the Test arena.

Granted, any man-to-man comparisons before the match would have put Leicester ahead in all but three or four positions on the pitch, an assessment that would only have become less favourable to the Scots as their gruesome experience unfolded. Mike Blair was the better of the two scrum-halves, Ross Ford (early line-out calamities apart) impressed at hooker and David Callam showed powerfully at number 8, but collectively Edinburgh lacked the hard-nosed and purposeful look that Leicester sported throughout.

advertisementSimilar things were no doubt being said after the Ospreys - glistening with international players from Wales, Scotland and New Zealand - fell 26-18 to Gloucester, after the Dragons' 45-17 home defeat by London Irish and after Llanelli went down 33-17 to Wasps. Cardiff did scrape a 13-13 draw against Harlequins, a meagre achievement on a weekend in which contests between Magners League and Guinness Premiership sides produced bragging rights in abundance for the boys from the black stuff.

Of course, too much can be taken from a single tranche of results. The previous weekend, Edinburgh had competed marvellously in the course of their 19-15 loss to three-times Heineken Cup winners Toulouse, Glasgow ran Saracens achingly close before going down 33-31 at Vicarage Road and Leinster produced a thunderous performance in beating Leicester 22-9 in Dublin. Yet the odd win and a few near-misses cannot obliterate the general impression that the Celtic clubs are falling behind their English and French counterparts.

The recent World Cup, in which Ireland and Wales suffered the ignominy of failing to reach the quarter-final stage - which Scotland scraped into with little to spare - only reinforced the argument that the Magners League is doing little to prepare its players and its teams to step up to a higher level. In absolute terms, there is little doubting that the raw talent and ability are there, but the qualities required to dig out victory in adversity are somehow absent.

The obvious conclusion is that adversity doesn't actually play a part in the Magners League as it is currently constituted. With neither promotion nor relegation, the difference between winning and losing is inconsequential, while guaranteed places in European competitions lend a humdrum atmosphere to far too many of its matches. Many hardcore rugby supporters would struggle to tell you who its reigning champions are. Triumphs mean little without the possibility of disaster as well.

Belatedly, the league organisers have begun to look at ways to spice up the competition, most probably through the introduction of a system of play-offs at the season's end. Play-offs are no panacea - perversely, they can actually punish those better sides who might have other competitive commitments to deal with - but their shortcomings are far fewer than an arrangement that allows the league to peter out with one meaningless match after another.

Yet there is also a sense that it is not a tinkering with the deck chairs that is required, but a fundamental change of course. So long as the governing bodies of Scotland, Wales and Ireland look on the league only as a development exercise, a training ground for their top players, then its value will be critically undermined.

This afternoon, for instance, when Edinburgh should have been firing themselves up to make amends for their Welford Road disaster, they will find themselves up against a Llanelli Scarlets side who have been hopelessly weakened by selections for Wales' international against South Africa at the Millennium Stadium, a meaningless match against understrength opponents, staged only to swell the coffers of the WRU. This in a season when the Magners League has already been diminished by the scheduling of the World Cup and will be limping along on a stop-start basis until after the conclusion of the RBS Six Nations next March.

All very well for the leading players, but a maddening pattern for those on the next level down. And after their summer of discontent and an exodus of Test stars, Edinburgh are in desperate need of competitive continuity to generate the experience, maturity, self-knowledge and understanding they were so desperately lacking last weekend.

The frustration for their supporters must be that Edinburgh are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a bad team. In such players as Nick de Luca, Ben Cairns, Ross Rennie and Andrew Turnbull they have the raw material to make, in due time, a very good team. Robinson has made it clear that he expects there will be pain along the way, but it seems cruel that the side must operate under circumstances in which pain is only likely to be prolonged.

Perversely, this might be one day when the league's main weakness works in his favour. Having nursed their Welford Road bruises for a week, Edinburgh's players may consider the match an occasion to inflict a few of their own.

This article was posted on 25-Nov-2007, 08:59 by Hugh Barrow.