TODAYS HERALD REPORTS

Chief executive and head coach strive for success
KEVIN FERRIE January 22 2009
Announcing his Six Nations Championship squad this week, Frank Hadden sought, as ever, to set the agenda by outlining what he saw as the central considerations for the forthcoming campaign. Scotland's head coach might, however, have been setting the keynote for the entire Scottish Rugby Union operation.

"The key theme of a very substantial feedback process . . . was very much looking at decision making under pressure and the quality of the decision-making," he said.

Mike Brewer, his new forwards coach, then spoke of players having to be more intuitive and to realise that if they wait until they have to react to things then the opportunity has gone. Both were talking about the difference between having the right idea of what needs to be done and having the personnel who can make the right decisions to maximise the reward for the effort that has gone in.


There is a sense of optimism around in Scottish rugby right now and the national team has played a part in that. The performances against New Zealand and South Africa were encouraging without producing the desired results. While the strategy was right, there were mistakes made when it came to execution and that is very much the situation across the organisation.

Gordon McKie has been SRU chief executive for almost exactly the same length of time as Hadden has been national coach. Both initially found themselves confronted with chaos and disarray and pretty much had to start from scratch.

Following their honeymoon periods, they have been challenged in their different ways. Both have broadly improved matters without yet getting the best possible outcome.

If Hadden's troubles turning chance-creation into tries have been well discussed, the SRU administration's issues may be a little more obscure, but the comparison is with matters such as: n The SRU's own press releases indicated that the dope-testing investigations into Scott MacLeod could have been dealt with much more precipitately, both through checks on his medication and better examination of legal precedent when it came to the effect of heavy drinking on testosterone levels.

n While the policy on making big matches ticket only' is understandable, the ludicrous spectacle of would-be spectators being left outside when Murrayfield was more than half-empty for the visit of the world champions could surely have been avoided by the application of some common sense.

n Similarly, the inflexibility of ticket-office staff when members of the public sought to buy more than the permitted number of tickets for matches that had not been sold out, so could hardly be set to become black market targets, was an embarrassment.

If that damaged goodwill among the public, then the ruling that the SRU's own member clubs could not rearrange kick-offs to suit themselves during the autumn Tests was almost designed to generate bad feeling. All that was required was for club administrators to be told the simple truth that while Murrayfield was not recommending such action, no sanction was applicable for making such changes.

On which note, this week's revelation by the Baggy Pipers that they had been refused permission to present cheques to charity at the recent Edinburgh-Glasgow derby was excruciating in its failure to realise that this was something that could only be good news all round.

Of course, no organisation likes bad publicity and some at the SRU were a bit miffed by The Herald's failure to come over all aquiver at the news that their 60-man team of development officers had upped the number of youngsters playing the game by 1900 this past year. In expressing concern, they focused on comparisons made with other sports that they thought unfair, rather than explaining why we should celebrate generating three new junior players, per age grade, per development officer.

Since that article appeared, a friend who is involved in youth rugby took that arithmetic a step further. He estimated the gross salaries of those development officers at £1.2m - on the conservative basis of salaries at £20,000 a man - and reckoned that came to some £631 per youngster to get them involved in the game. He wondered whether, given access to that funding, clubs and their volunteers might do a better job.

The devil is in the detail and, as with the national team's failure to turn effort and opportunities into scores, so the SRU must ensure that all its hard work is not undone by sloppy work on the finishing touches.

Four years into their respective projects, the chief executive and the head coach still live in difficult times. But for McKie, like Hadden, the key is getting the right people in the right places doing the right things at the right time. Both should, by now, have worked out how to do that.

This article was originally posted on 22-Jan-2009, 08:15 by Hugh Barrow.
Last updated by Hugh Barrow on 22-Jan-2009, 09:09.