Sunday Herald - 14 August 2005

Combination of luck and clout should benefit McKie
Rugby: With the SRU’s new chief executive now in place, Lewis Stuart looks at the challenges facing him



YOU are sitting at home, minding your own business and thinking of nothing more demanding than your golf handicap and the top-notch job you have already decided to accept. Out of the blue, the phone rings: “How would you like to save Scottish rugby?” says the voice at the other end.
Depending how you look at it, the suggestion was either a life-defining challenge, or a short-cut to the loony bin. The man in the hot seat will, after all, be the fifth chief executive to fill the post in less than 20 months, as incumbents jumped in and out at such an alarming rate that it was hard to tell if it was an executive chair or an impaling rod sitting behind the boss’ desk. Both permanent predecessors were undermined and effectively sacked.

Exciting challenge or down payment on a straitjacket, it is all bit late for Gordon McKie, because 96 hours after that call from he blue, he was duly signing on as the Lone Ranger, his mission to ride to the rescue of the basket case known as the Scottish Rugby Union located somewhere in the wild west of Edinburgh.

Like the fictional hero, riding to the rescue is simply what McKie does. Replace the six-shooter with a troubleshooter and you have your man. Among all the all the praise being flung round Scottish rugby’s headquarters last week, the one that shouted loudest was the whisper from the Bank of Scotland – to which the SRU is in hock for a mere £23million – that they had nudged him towards the job in the first place.

It is a ringing endorsement of the 48-year-old, since his previous bank-inspired rescue act had failed with the company, Semple, closing in May despite McKie slashing the annual loss from £19m to break-even. Despite the union’s huge borrowings, his time starts with the business already expecting to head into profit when this year’s results are published.

Which means that far from seeing rugby in Scotland as a case for the last rites, McKie sees it as only a bit sick; on a health scale of one to ten, he marks the SRU as somewhere around a six or seven, not even in hospital, never mind death’s door. The key is operating at a profit. Big debts are nothing unusual in sport and the Welsh union, for example, can cheerfully owe its bank a £65m mortgage on the Millennium Stadium as long as it keeps makes an annual profit .

Whether one of the professional teams will be axed as part of the inevitable cuts is less clear. The fact is that the SRU was on top of its financial woes until it expanded into the Borders but McKie’s instinct seems to be to trade his way to profit. He is not stupid enough have offered any guarantees but before he had even started work his gut reaction to the issue was “we want more people playing rugby at every level, not less”. Read what you like into the fact that the first pro team he will visit will be the Borders, sometime this week.

Three pro teams plus the costs of a viable national side and the return of the A team likely to be announced in November, means he needs to generate a lot more money so that the union can afford professional rugby. Which, in turn means that the most urgent task is to rebuild the image of the union so that potential sponsors and investors see it as a smart, well-run organisation with plenty of savvy. If it continues to be seen as a financial black hole, sucking in cash that disappears into a state of quantum uncertainty fuelled by infighting, backstabbing and apathy, nobody with a worthwhile bank balance will give it the time of day.

McKie, along with Andy Irvine – whose name alone can open doors – and Allan Munro are the new faces of the game and they have to go out into the market and preach the virtues of the summer’s reforms in the ruling structure with all the vehemence of sinners on the day of judgement.

To do that he needs the staff onside and until the redundancy position is clear that will be tricky. He will certainly be a radically different sort of leader to the last permanent holder of his office, Phil Anderton. Young, brash and gung-ho, Anderton led with energy and enthusiasm but struggled to understand why some found it hard to follow. McKie, an accountant by training, will be much quieter, more in the mould of Bill Watson, the union’s first chief executive but, crucially with the clout to say “the buck stops here” and mean it.

Crucially, he may also strike lucky. Sometime in the next three months the saga over whether or not some of the land around the stadium can be used for building will come to a head. If it wins the quarrel with the council, the union could halve its debt by selling the coach park behind the ice rink. What a start that would be for the new man, and a good way to keep the straitjacket at bay.

This article was posted on 14-Aug-2005, 08:16 by Hugh Barrow.