League restructuring plans fall flat at SRU annual meeting
Published on 27 Jun 2010

Lewis Stuart

In the end, what a lot of fuss about nothing.

The build-up to yesterday’s demand at Scottish Rugby’s annual general meeting for a radical restructuring of the domestic leagues had been full of fire and fury; it turned into a damp squib.

The hint was there at the start. Invited to read the motion
to the delegates, Graham Ireland, the SRU company secretary, took one look at the two pages that laid out the proposals and balked at the idea, even before he contemplated a third page that set out the suggested amendment. “I propose we take it as read,” he said. The collective sigh of relief showed he had gauged the mood correctly.

Another 37 minutes later, they were even more grateful.

Perhaps it was a cunning plan by the group of clubs behind the idea to bludgeon the delegates into submission, as speaker after speaker came forward to hammer home the idea that breaking the game in Scotland into regional leagues as soon as you get below the top 24 clubs was the only way to enthuse players, stoke up enthusiasm and find financial salvation.

If so, it failed. Dismally. By the time the seventh speaker had given way and Jim Fleming,
the referees’ representative on the Scottish Rugby Council,
was pointing out that the plan was almost identical to the one that had been rejected by the same meeting only two years ago and was short on essential detail, the mood had gone from rapt attention to counting the tiles on the ceiling of the meeting room at Murrayfield.

Anyway, Fleming added, the Murrayfield authorities
promised to come back with a properly thought-out version to the next agm and if accepted it could be implemented immediately, so for those committed to the cause, regional rugby might still be only a year away. Not that support is guaranteed next year either, since by far the most passionate contribution came from Alasdair Farquharson from Abedeenshire who branded the idea “geographic apartheid”.

So the vote, and not even the need for a count. It was all decided on a show of hands, an overwhelming defeat for the shake-up proposal, with only a few more than the original group of clubs that had put their names to the plan lending it their support.

Almost an hour of discussion and it all ended with a whimper before delegates went on to approve the new structure for the top two divisions
– the over-complicated idea of starting with two divisions of 12 but finishing with three divisions of eight – and on to look at a number of technical
motions on subjects as diverse as the rules for players registering with two clubs to how many vice-presidents there should be.

The biggest round of applause was reserved for the familiar appeal from George Russell of Moray House RFC with his annual call for a Scottish Rugby Museum, a feature of every agm since 2002 when he first raised the issue.

It all finished with Ian “Mighty Mouse” McLauchlan, being installed as president. “I need to get round a few clubs and find out where they are coming from,” he admitted afterwards. “There is a huge groundswell of goodwill within rugby in Scotland, which is reflected in the finances and I think the wins in Argentina will fill the stadium no problem, while the pro teams will take an advance this year because of the success of the national side.

“I know a lot of people in the international game. I’ll go in and just represent Scotland. We are kind of on the periphery,
a very small country, and we need every single strand of our game to be pulling together to get us to the top.”

This article was posted on 27-Jun-2010, 19:44 by Hugh Barrow.