SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY REPORTS

IAIN MORRISON


THREE years ago an astonishing thing happened. The Glasgow Hawks amateur prop Euan Murray, playing in BT Premier One, was selected to tour with the full Scotland national squad to the USA/Canada. Crucial university exams meant that he was obliged to cry off and he was replaced by the unknown former Heriot\'s tight-head Bruce Douglas, six months his elder.

Douglas was sufficiently impressive on that tour to start for Scotland in all three autumn Tests and in the intervening years he has gone on to win 34 caps. Murray has one, as a substitute against Romania last time out. Now he has a chance for more, having been called into Frank Hadden\'s training squad for the autumn test series. Given what has gone before, Murray isn\'t counting his chickens just yet.


The big Glasgow forward has been teetering on the brink of a Scotland breakthrough for so long now that he must be suffering vertigo. But instead of becoming a cornerstone of the national pack Murray has suffered the sort of luck that suggests he was once let loose with a mallet in a mirror factory.

Touring in Australia with Scotland last summer he returned home early with a stress fracture of his vertebrae. Then came the 12-week ban, reduced on appeal to eight, for stamping on an opponent\'s head, of which more later. When he returned to action he injured his shoulder when training with Scotland and missed another six weeks.

Last summer he hurt one of his quadriceps, which caused him to sit out the opening game of the current season. Against all odds Murray then played for the full 80 minutes of the match against Leinster only to collect what he calls a \"bang on the head\" 10 minutes into the following game against Munster.

Much has been written about the incident in which Murray suffered a fit on the pitch, not uncommon after a severe head trauma but no less ugly for that.

\"Inexplicably I tackled the winger with my wrong shoulder so I got my head in the way of his knees and I was much lower than I would normally tackle,\" he says before going on to

explain the inexplicable: \"When I woke up I had two bangs on my head.

\"The first one may have superseded the second and that would help explain the mistake I made in the tackle.\"

He could have played last weekend against Edinburgh, but the fates had other ideas as the big man was laid up with a bout of tonsillitis served with an unhealthy dressing of fever.

Perhaps the long run of bad luck is just the gods redressing the balance a little since they originally blessed the prop forward with a rare combination of brains and brawn when one or the other is considered generous.

He is fully qualified as a vet, getting his results on the Friday and reporting for his first Glasgow training session the following Monday, and is clearly smarter tha your average bear. But despite the intellect Murray cant quite resist playing to the galleries.

\"I was probably a teacher\'s worst nightmare at school,\" he admits. \"I wasn\'t really badly behaved but I was always talking and not paying attention. I always got a report card that said: \'Lacks concentration\'. I played the fool through much of university and I always had fun.\" And now?

\"And now I am trying to settle down a bit!\" Laughter gives way, if only briefly, to a more considered side of his character. \"Now I have to be one of the leaders in this team because we don\'t have a lot of senior players. If I act the fool on the training pitch for example I won\'t get the respect of my fellow players. There is a time and a place for fooling around and having fun.\"

Murray\'s first introduction to rugby, aged 11 at Clarkston, was not an unqualified success. Short of footwear he borrowed his sisters\' hockey boots and, not naturally, found himself the butt of his teammates\' humour.

But during the match the joker had the last laugh as he tackled the principal protagonist hard enough to put him off the field. A love affair with knocking people over was born and Murray could probably have sported the entire St Trinian\'s outfit the following weekend without generating so much as a snigger.

Unconventional footwear seems to be a recurrent theme in Murray\'s life but if he was an overly sensitive child he has grown a considerably thicker hide since then. He turns up to the interview, one day before the photographs were taken, resplendent in a tweed jacket. This sartorial elegance is somewhat undermined by a scruffy sweatshirt, scruffier jeans and, that Brit abroad faux pas, sandals and socks.

He cares not a hoot what anyone thinks, finding nothing but humour in his own lack of style - but then tipping the scales at 118kg he can well afford this insouciance.

Indeed he claims that after showcasing the footwear amongst the Glasgow squad other scandal-and-sock aficionados have come out of the closet. No names no pack drill, they know who they are. Murray is laid back, good company and his chat is peppered with gales of laughter that is, as often as not, directed at his own jokes. Indeed just about the only time his good humour deserts the muscular prop is when talking about the ban he received last season for allegedly kicking an opponent in the head.

\"The referee said I stamped on his head. The player said I didn\'t. To this day the player still says I didn\'t. No one else saw anything apart from the referee. I still contest my innocence, of course I do.

\"The only thing that annoys me is the way that the SRU banned me for longer than other nations were doing for similar misdemeanours. There was a question mark over it and they [the SRU] seemed to throw the book at me and give me a big ban which seems pretty unjustified looking at what other nations were doing. The SRU had taken too long [there is a time limit on passing judgment] and they weren\'t allowed to but they said, \'We don\'t care, we\'re going to ban you anyway\'.

\"It seemed to me that they wanted to do anything in their power to get me. Not because I was guilty but because I\'d dared to catch them out with the [time limit on] rulings. They were contacting lawyers in England trying to do everything in their power to get me banned.\"

The entire incident has clearly left a sour taste in Murray\'s mouth, although he does not seem the type to nurse a grudge for the sake of it. Moreover, he is too busy at the moment to concentrate on anything other than shaking off his latest injury and pulling Glasgow out of their early season slump.

\"I\'ve had a lot of injuries and maybe things are conspiring against me,\" he says, \"but I\'ve got a lot of things I need to achieve. My passion for the game is still there, I\'ve got a lot to offer and in no way have I reached my potential.\"

With a career disrupted by studies, countless injuries and a disciplinary panel this last fact is undoubtedly true and that is hugely encouraging because Murray is already a talisman for Glasgow, one whose very presence on the pitch is enough to lift the players around him.

Iain Milne retired from international duty in 1990, the same year that Murray was getting his first taste of the game. Scotland has not had an immense, muscular immovable object cementing their scrum since then but, if the fates concur, Murray could yet progress from borrowing his sisters\' boots to filling those of \"The Bear\".

This article was posted on 9-Oct-2005, 08:36 by Hugh Barrow.