THE HERALD REPORTS

KEVIN FERRIE August 16 2008
The Scottish Rugby Union last night confirmed that it is among 10 candidates to host the sport's 2015 and 2019 World Cups but stressed that does not mean it is yet fully committed to making a bid for either event.

Murrayfield officials outlined their position after the International Rugby Board announced an "unprecedented response" to its invitation to rugby unions to express intent. By last night's 5pm deadline, Australia, England, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, South Africa, Russia and Wales had also made written submissions, which allow them to find out just what the conditions of any bid for one or both tournaments will be.

The unions now have until next May to submit detailed tender responses but the SRU said they have only until September 30 to indicate whether they can meet the conditions and want to continue with the process.


That would seem a relatively short timescale but a Scottish bid has been under consideration for two years since it was announced that Event Scotland was conducting a feasibility study into the possibility.

In terms of the IRB process, however, Dominick Mackay, the SRU's director of communications, said this was only the beginning. "This is the first stage by which we had to formally express an interest in order to keep our options open," he said.

Those options include submitting a solo bid or seeking to do so as co-hosts. While the SRU are naturally unwilling to state its preferred option among those, the scale of the financial commitment likely to be required very much favours going into partnership with other countries.

The trouble with that is that to date there has been a clear difference in the success of World Cups staged by solo countries as opposed to those shared among a group of unions in the UK in both 1991 and 1999.

Last year's World Cup staged in France was a huge success, however, generating a record net surplus of �122.4m in spite of the decision to stage some matches in Scotland and Wales.

"It would be a big challenge for Scotland to stage a World Cup, but the Scottish government is fully supportive of our current position," Mackay observed.

This article was posted on 16-Aug-2008, 07:29 by Hugh Barrow.