THE HERALD REPORTS

Experiment’s aim is to give Scots one thing money can’t buy: belief
KEVIN FERRIE July 16 2009
It is hardly the equivalent of Samurai Bushido but for Glasgow's aspiring rugby players the way of the Warrior will nowinclude a new regime designed to bring out qualities beyond the physical.

By inviting Allan Mackintosh, the performance coach, to put seven of his players on to a leadership training course, Sean Lineen, Glasgow Warriors' head coach, has engaged in an experiment that everyone involved in the process of turning promising amateurs into productive professional sportsmen should watch closely.

It is far from an issue restricted to rugby. Over this fortnight, in which the spotlight has turned to our golfers, many column inches are being devoted to what is described as the transition phase.

On the one hand, this is a golden age for Scotland's amateur golfers. In just four years, we have witnessed Lloyd Saltman's silver medal-winning exploits at the Open in 2005; Richie Ramsay becoming the first Scot to win the US Amateur for 108 years in 2006; last year's World Championship-winning effort as a three-man team won the Eisenhower Trophy; and this month's European Team Championship winning effort by the six-man team.

Yet at the same time there is not a single Scot in the top 100 of the professional world rankings; Gary Orr is highest placed at 124th and Alastair Forsyth, who has not qualified for this week's Open Championship, next at 150. After them come Paul Lawrie and David Drysdale, at 177 and 178, respectively 10 and 11 places behind Shane Lowry, the Irishman who turned professional after his astonishing win in the Irish Open in May.

The week before his startling triumph, Lowry was a modest jointsixth in what proved to be the last amateur event he contested, the Irish Men's Amateur Open. The title went to Scotland's Gavin Dear, while Wallace Booth, a team-mate in those world and European Championship-winning teams, was runner-up. At the Barclays Scottish Open last week, Booth was the Scottish amateur given the equivalent invitation to his national open as that which catapulted Lowry to fame. After a horrible opening 83, this fine young golfer finished dead last.

Meanwhile, the more money thatis ploughed into Scottish cricket - three home-based players have now been put on full-time contracts for the first time this year - the more they seem to struggle on the international stage.

All very odd but what is increasingly being identified as an issue is shortage of self-belief, or what we tend these days to refer to as a lack of swagger.

Rugby is in an almost unique position to assess this because of the switch from an all-amateur sport, in which Scotland enjoyed its best spell in the 80s and 90s, to professionalism just 14 years ago. Consequently, we can compare modern professional players with their immediate predecessors and scrutinise the differences.

The impression is that those who played as amateurs were more rounded because they were juggling working lives outside the game with their training and playing schedules.

That is hard to replicate but good coaches must find a way and it was among the first things that Andy Robinson, the ebullient Englishman who was the real coach of his country's World Cup-winning team when he worked under the managership of Clive Woodward, began to address on taking over as Scotland's head coach last month.

Taking just 26 players to Romania for the IRB Nations Cup, he turned the tricky business of leaving players out of match squads into an opportunity for those individuals, by turning them into match analysts.

Having had their findings approved by the management, itself a rewarding and confidence-boosting experience for those involved, they were then invited to present them to their fellow players.

That is where the Warriors programme comes in. Over the next six months the seven players selected - they range from raw youngsters to more experienced players who need to learn to impose themselves more - will research chosen aspects of the Warriors operation before making presentations, first to their peers, then to a group of leading Glasgow business people.

Mackintosh calls his programme E5 and says it seeks to engage, enlighten, educate, entertain and encourage participants.

"This process has been used to great effect recently in business,"

he said.

We shall see how that translates to sport, but it seems obvious that this has the potential to bring more out of players who have the talent and physicality to compete with the best, as the Warriors showed when winning in Toulouse last year.

This lack of swagger may not just be a Scottish problem, but it seems to be something to which young Scottish sportsmen are particularly prone. It will be fascinating to see whether this programme helps produce more influential figures on the pitch.

This article was posted on 16-Jul-2009, 07:19 by Hugh Barrow.