The Sunday Herald reports


With the odds stacked against Scotland in the IRB Sevens World Series, it is time the SRU put up or opt out
Published on 23 May 2010


Alasdair Reid

Let’s start with some Scottish success stories from this season’s IRB Sevens World Series.

No, really. We beat Japan three times. We absolutely hammered Papua New Guinea in the Wellington tournament in February. We put 42 points past Chinese Taipei in Hong Kong two months ago. We won the Shield finals in George and Las Vegas.

Now let’s rain a little reality on that glorious parade. We didn’t beat a team of any note, anywhere, at any tourn-ament. We lost three times to Argentina. We are joint-bottom (with France) among the 12 core teams in the IRB series. There are no points on offer for winning a Shield.

The SRU’s communications department has kept up a jaunty stream of optimistic despatches, but you suspect that even their well-practised talents for spinning good news out of bad have been stretched close to breaking
point by the campaign to date. There comes a time where some straight-
talking is required, and the straight line on Scotland’s performances is that they haven’t been up to scratch.

But then again, there was never much
chance they would be, given half-hearted
commitment from Murrayfield’s corrid-
ors of power and the half-baked strategy
that has underpinned Scottish particip-ation. While the recognised powers of the shortened game have thrown resources and energy into their involvement, you would be painting a rosier picture than it deserved to suggest the Scottish masterplan might have been scribbled out on a fag packet five minutes before the first tournament began.

The most comic expression of that approach was the Union’s decision to award specialist sevens contracts to three players at the start of the season. Yes, you read that right, three players
– four fewer than you need to put a team on the pitch. Mike Adamson, Scott Forrest and Colin Shaw are all good players, but it would be stretching credibility to suggest they could do the work of another four men.

So Scotland have scratched, scraped and cobbled together teams from one tournament to another, a hotch-botch of players who were never likely to do much more than reflect the muddle-minded thinking of the denizens of EH12. Scotland pitched up in Dubai with a jerry-built squad made up of the trio of specialists and a guddle of others from the peripheries of the pro game, some decent club players and a few promising teenagers. In the circumstances, the fact they drew one (and lost four) of their five ties can probably be hailed as a mighty achievement.

Only five of the Scottish squad for Dubai were in the party that made their way to Australia in March. Over the course of the season, Scotland have now called up a staggering total of 32 players for just eight tournaments. In stark and telling contrast, South Africa used only 18 in the course of winning their World Series title last season.

There is something almost heroic in the fact the Scots have won any games at all, but that quality is better epitom-ised by the forbearance of national sevens coach Stephen Gemmell, who has stuck gamely to his task throughout. Yet even he can be seen as a motif for Scotland’s less than wholehearted approach to the sevens undertaking, for he has been obliged to juggle the coaching role with his responsibilities as national academy manager.

“I’m not making excuses, but you have to look at the context,” says Gemmell of the lowly status of Scotland in a game that was invented by the Scotsman, Ned Haig. That context is one in which the top sides largely have dedicated sevens squads, and there is a calendar that hugely favours the southern hemisphere teams. Small wonder that positions one to four in the series standings are taken by Samoa, New Zealand, Fiji and Australia.

“We need to do it properly,” Gemmell adds. “It can’t be a tournament here then out and a tournament there and then out. We don’t have the playing resources of other countries but we’ve got to use our players better than that.

“If we buy into sevens in terms of the development of players then it can work. But that development can only take place if it is sustained and they get to play a number of events. If you parachute them in for a couple of tournaments then take them out again then of course they are going to struggle.

“It’s about giving players an opport-unity to move to the next level. A couple of seasons ago, when we had a period of something like nine successive quarter-finals, the important thing was that we had continuity in the squad. We had a group of players who were the backbone of the squad in every tournament.”

From that period, Gemmell reels off the names of players such as Richie Vernon, Jim Thompson and Roddy Grant, who were core figures. All three have gone on to become established professionals
with either Edinburgh and Glasgow. Vernon has gone even higher, making his Scotland Test debut last November.
Thompson is likely to be capped in Argentina next month and few would bet against Grant reaching that level as well.

Ironically, Scotland’s best hopes of securing the World Series points that have eluded them so far this season rest on Gemmell’s endorsement of the 
parachuting policy that has undermined him up to this stage. For the final two events of the season – this weekend’s tournament in London and next weekend’s Murrayfield sevens in Edinburgh – he has bolstered his callow squad with solid experience, the most significant addition being the 48-times-capped Ally Hogg, who also figured at the same stage last year, when Scotland reached back-to-back semi-finals.

Drawn in a pool with the USA, Fiji and Wales, the Scots have at least managed to avoid Samoa and New Zealand, the only two teams in the running to lift the overall series title. Gemmell expects a far more competitive performance from his side than he has seen to date, with the home crowd and the presence of players of Hogg’s calibre – John Houston, Grant, Mark Robertson and Greig Laidlaw have also been called up from Edinburgh – combining to give the team a lift.

“When we announced the squad we hoped the crowd would believe it was a team who could be competitive and had names they could recognise,” Gemmell says. “As a coach, I believe those players can make a difference. That’s what they did last year. But the challenge is that the game has moved on at such a pace that even those guys have to get up to speed.

“They’ve all come in at the end of a long hard season, but they’ve come with real enthusiasm and they all want to be here. That’s the encouraging thing for me.”

And yet, there must be massive doubts about Scotland continuing to be involved in the global series. If a job can’t be done well is it worth doing at all? Ireland play no part in IRB sevens, yet the country’s rugby seems none the worse for that policy.

Gemmell will continue to argue the case for sevens as he moves into the role of SRU head of player development in the months ahead. With Glasgow 2014 looming, there is a powerful political case for retaining a Scottish presence on the world circuit. But money talks loudest
at Murrayfield these days, and it may have the last word this time as well.

This article was originally posted on 23-May-2010, 10:19 by Hugh Barrow.
Last updated by Hugh Barrow on 23-May-2010, 10:20.