The Sunday Herald writes

Warriors chief executive Ian Riddoch assures Alasdair Reid the second city’s rugby club has plenty of reasons to be optimistic
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IAN RIDDOCH'S curriculum vitae maps a career spent in the upper echelons of sports marketing, but it is hard to imagine that any of his previous posts could have given him an insight into the levels of utter thanklessness and sheer frustration that are the dubious perks of the job of persuading the citizens of Glasgow to get behind the rugby club that bears their city's name.

Yet, if the 41-year-old chief executive of the Glasgow Warriors sometimes feels he came second to Sisyphus in the lottery of working life, he disguises his disappointments well, behind a facade of well-rehearsed enthusiasm for the business of promoting rugby to the second city of the empire. Towards the tail end of a season that must have looked alarmingly similar to an obstacle course at times there is no slump to his shoulders nor any careworn expression across his face, rather an obvious and indomitable enthusiasm for knuckling down and getting on with the job.

At least his upbeat outlook will have some sort of belated reward next Friday when the inter-city contest with Edinburgh is expected to draw a crowd of somewhere around 5000 souls to Firhill. The consequence of that should be an average attendance for the season of close to 2500 - respectable enough in terms of the dismal track record of professional rugby in Scotland. But, it still an embarrassing distance behind the sort of numbers that have charted the popular and commercial success of the sport in England, Ireland and Wales in recent years.

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Moreover, Riddoch is only too well aware that even that modest total would serve to flatter Glasgow's pulling power over the past few months, for, were he to remove both the Edinburgh game and January's critical Heineken Cup match against Saracens from his equations, he would be looking at an average of just over 1800. Thousands, to put it bluntly, have not been stuck in traffic jams on the Garscube Road, the stayaway tendency being all the more concerning when you remember that Glasgow's crowds have not been significantly better than those of the Border Reivers, the side that supposedly died of indifference just over a year ago.

Of course, Riddoch's Glasgow has the city location and the industrial conurbation constituency that were never exactly obvious in the Tweed valley. Yet, it is one thing to have those advantages on paper, quite another to persuade Glaswegians to imprint their bums upon the Firhill seats. And as bottom lines of another sort are what seem to matter most at Murrayfield these days, Riddoch knows he has a challenge on his hands.

But one he claims to relish. "I'm really encouraged by where we are," he says, going on to explain that Glasgow's crowd returns plot a rising graph across the season's calendar. "We started the season during the World Cup, when the best players were still involved with the tournament, and our season opener was against Connacht. No disrespect to them, but they're not the biggest draw in the game.

"I had only just come on board, the right team of people wasn't yet in place and we were only just starting to get going with our marketing. Everything happened very late in the day. We really began at the wrong time, but, slowly and surely, it did start to rise.

"Look, everyone knows you can carve up statistics any way you want, but the crowds from 2008 - since the turn of the year - have been really encouraging. Now we understand what we're doing better, we're comfortable in our relationship with Partick Thistle here at Firhill and we're starting to embrace the business community much better.

"Last year, we did 90 hospitality covers over the whole season; this year, we're averaging 90 covers per game. It's night and day. I really do believe we're on the right track."

A curmudgeon might point out that Glasgow's modest improvements would hardly register on the Richter scales installed at Ibrox or Parkhead, and that Riddoch could be a tad premature in his trumpeting of figures that are still, not to mince words on the matter, on the meagre side of paltry.

Yet, the man himself is adamant that the groundwork being done now will pay off in due course, and that audiences for sport, with all their complex bonds of geography and other allegiances, are rarely brought together overnight.

"These things need time," Riddoch says with real conviction. "You need continuity, a good fixture list, the right venue and facilities and a drive and energy within the business. Maybe the drive has been lacking in the past, but we now have the people here to provide that. It's about getting everything in place to be successful, not just one or two things."

Perhaps because his own pay cheque is still printed and signed at the other end of the M8, Riddoch shows an understandable reluctance to criticise the SRU policies of the past, but only a fool could ignore the fact that the governing body's catastrophically piecemeal approach has done considerably more harm than good in its 13-year grapple with the realities of professional sport. Only now are the bean-counters at Murrayfield starting to show anything resembling empathy for the seed-planters in the field in their belated appreciation that it can take years to get any significant payback from investment in growing an audience.

In that regard, the five-year plan the Union unveiled last year did at least, and at last, give official recognition to the concept of nurturing crowd affections over time, rather than expecting them to happen on an almost spontaneous basis. "We're a big part of that plan," says Riddoch.

"And we have pretty clear objectives within that, such as the target of an average crowd of 5000 by 2012. At the moment, I'm confident that we have the commitment and backing of Murrayfield to make this work."

Yet, Glasgow's prospects also rely critically on having a half-decent product to put before their punters. And short of giving away a copy of Will Carling's autobiography with every ticket, you would struggle to come up with a more effective way of deterring an audience than the fixture list Glasgow have struggled against all season. The madness of it all was never better illustrated than by the fact that spectators who were drawn to watch the Saracens match at Firhill in January had to wait another six weeks to get their next fix of Glasgow rugby at the ground.

"Don't get me started on the fixture list," Riddoch says strongly. "It's my hobby horse, a massive challenge for us. It's a huge frustration because you want alternating home and away games through your season. We understand that there will be breaks for international matches, which we appreciate because that's where our funding comes from, but we're trying to work with Celtic Rugby to improve the schedule for us.

"The signs looke more hopeful on that front. I doubt that we'll get the fixture list we really want, but I'm confident we'll get one that represents a major improvement, which will help with continuity and the delivery of what we want to provide to the audience. We need that continuity more than anything else."

If there is a suggestion that Glasgow's current arrangement with Partick Thistle is a marriage of convenience, it is one which is also, according to Riddoch, marked by a growing mutual affection and an appreciation of the symbiotic potential of joint ventures. In time, the rugby club may find a home of its own, but there is a sense that it is settled in at Firhill for at least a few seasons yet. After years of crippling uncertainty, maybe that is no bad thing.

This article was posted on 6-Apr-2008, 07:53 by Hugh Barrow.