THE HERALD REPORTS
Hadden is making life harder for himself with his excuses

KEVIN FERRIE February 07 2008
After the opening round of RBS 6 Nations matches, who would have thought France would make three times as many changes as Scotland, or that Wales would also have dropped more players than their next opponents?

The eccentricities of the French are sometimes beyond analysis, but it is hard to reconcile last week's comments by Frank Hadden about the improved choice he now has with those statistics.

As I observed when he named the team last week, Scotland's head coach brought a new pressure upon himself by celebrating this improved competition for places, because that means there is more scope for suggesting he has got things wrong.

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I said he was opening himself up to the second-guessers. Little did I suspect he would be the one doing that second-guessing.

Attempting to explain away the apparent sluggishness of his side in their defeat to France last Sunday, Hadden yesterday went into some detail in explaining how hard it had been to get the balance right, between choosing those he thought were best for the job and those with the necessary game time under their belts.

He made much of eight members of the starting XV not having played for three weeks before that match, but four of those were Edinburgh players who were deliberately rested by their SRU-owned club. A fifth was Dave Callam, who has been kept out of the Edinburgh No.8 shirt by Ally Hogg, his club captain.

"If it had just been these guys in isolation it wouldn't have been so bad, but with the number who suddenly re-emerged from injury, in hindsight it might have been better that more guys had played more often," Hadden said.

Yet hindsight, which as the cliche goes is always 20/20, is something sports coaches are particularly scathing about when it is employed by critics and commentators. Hadden's job, and that of his management team, is to use foresight rather than hindsight.

The selection of Callam, now dropped out of the 22 altogether, was the only one I seriously questioned last week. That was mainly because Hogg was the man in possession, but he is also a leader, which was something Scotland seemed short of when things got difficult on Sunday.

I had not seen the extra week's lay-off for Mike Blair, Nick De Luca, Ross Ford and Allan Jacobsen as an issue. But if Hadden did, as he now claims, then he should certainly have taken it into account, since he knew that Andy Henderson and Euan Murray would be coming in directly after injury lay-offs and that Jim Hamilton's game time at Leicester had been limited.

"It's quite difficult to judge whether it affects some players more than others. Some people thrive on it and what we've got is such a young squad that we're still working these guys out . . . they're still working themselves out. It's not an exact science," Hadden said.

Perhaps not, but that is why elite coaches who, in this case, have been working with these players for a considerable time, are in the jobs they are in, to make these decisions in as scientific a way as they can.

When Hadden then cited the absence of Magners League matches the week before the RBS 6 Nations as having contributed to the problem, it was almost laughable. It was the international coaches in the Celtic countries who pushed for those weeks off ahead of Test matches.

Just a few weeks ago, Hadden was expressing envy of the Irish in particular because they will, as a result of that, have had their squad together much longer than he will because so many of his players are based in England or France.

Either there is, as he has claimed, sufficient competition for places that Scotland can choose fit, in-form players for Tests, or there is not. With Simon Taylor still unavailable, the only unenforced change was replacing Callam, not with Hogg, but with Kelly Brown who has played a couple of times at No.8 this season but is usually at blindside flanker for Glasgow Warriors.

Brown did add much-needed dynamism to the team, but like the recalled Chris Paterson is now being asked to take on a specialist role that he has not regularly been performing for his club.

As through the years when he defied conventional wisdom by refusing to field Paterson at stand-off, or in trying to justify his claims that Rory Lamont is a better winger than a full-back, Hadden might give some thought to the fact that the job of being Scotland's head coach is difficult enough without making it harder for himself.

This article was posted on 7-Feb-2008, 08:27 by Hugh Barrow.