Time For A Split Between The Professionals and The Grass Roots

I WONDER, as they watch from the great press box in the sky, the bourach which Scottish Rugby has become in 2018, what those giants of the past: Bill McLaren, Norman Mair, Brian Meek and Jock Wemyss, make of things.

 Brian Meek - I wonder what he and his like would make of today's moger

We are in deep, deep doo-dah, and, as if to confirm that one paper is in intensive care and the other in its death throes, The (Glasgow) Herald and The Scotsman do not seem to be noticing – so busy are their sports desk staff in covering the slightly lesser travails of our national football team – that Scottish Rugby too, is terminally ill.

But, at least big David Barnes and his terrific website: The Offside Line, has noticed, while down in darkest East Ayrshire, an aged hack is also warning that, unless things change – and quickly, we are awe doomed!!

Barney has written and promoted several excellent pieces on the demise of Scottish rugby in recent months, but, perhaps yesterday's piece, penned by Haddington RFC's President, Keith Wallace, was the grimmest and most-serious warning yet.

We need change, and quickly, or we will not have much of Scottish Rugby left.

Sure, TCD and the BT Murrayfield minions are good at sending-out glossy press releases, assuring us that all is well with the game, we are headed for the bright, sunlit uplands of great things, and world domination is just around the corner.

Then Keith, a guy toiling at the coal face to keep the club he loves going, jumps in with a dose of grim reality.

Simply reading his piece, which is, unlike some recent offerings from BTM, full of FACTS, and garnered from a guy in the front line, not somebody from GHQ, some miles back, is frankly scary.

Keith confirms what those of us who live in the real world have long been aware of, the player base in Scotland is shrinking – the young men of today simply have fallen out of love with playing the game. And if the alarming drop-off in players isn't halted soon, we will be unable to sustain the game.

But, the national team regularly sells-out the 67,000 capacity national stadium. Glasgow Warriors are packing them in at Scotstoun, and Edinburgh's crowds appear to be rising, albeit from a disgracefully-low base. So, from the cosy confines of BTM's executive offices, all seems well with the world – if you ignore the fact costs are rising faster than income and they are having to run faster merely to stand still as the black hole of the professional game swallows more and more cash.

I have been impressed by the efforts the six “lucky” clubs which have gained Super-6 franchises have been and are continuing to make, to make this flawed camel of a project work, but, I fear from them – simply because BTM has made such a cock-up of the whole thing from the start.

When is BTM going to face reality and admit:

Super-6 is a PERFORMANCE league – which will have a detrimental effect of the DOMESTIC game, particularly in Edinburgh and the Lothians.

As Keith Wallace proves in his TOL piece, the consequences of the ludicrous notion, you can have three of the six franchises within the capital, will be far-reaching.

 Keith Wallace

I have been saying for a while now – Scottish Rugby is now a two-tier game, and ought to be organised as such. We should let BTM run the national team, the Academy and age-group teams and Super-6 – everything else should be run by a rugby equivalent of the Scottish Junior Football Association, a Scottish Junior Rugby Union (SJRU).

This should be run by the clubs themselves, and a very-small national office, on a regionalised basis. Let the clubs work in a way which best suits their own particular needs, FFS, the Border League has been running for far longer than the National Leagues, and with less fuss, it can easily be done.

I am convinced, freed from the dead, clammy hand of BTM control-freakery, ordinary club rugby could, if not flourish as in the past, but, have a future.

This week the WRU faced reality, and re-organised itself. They now have a Professional Game Board to look after the professional game, and a Community Game Board to look after the grass-roots.

In Ireland, they have a more-federal set-up, with the IRFU delegating a greater degree of freedom to the four provincial unions – Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster. They run the four PRO14 teams and infrastructure, but, more-importantly they run the community game from far-closer to the clubs than BTM could ever be.

The ordinary clubs in Ulster don't have to trot down to Dublin to learn what is happening, ditto the clubs in Munster, instead, their contacts are with guys they know in Belfast, or Cork – why then cannot we have Regional officials based in Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, Ayrshire or the Borders?

A SJRU would, I am certain, be more nimble than the bloated Murrayfield administration, closer to the game, more-able to react to local issues. We would be able to see District problems sorted out at District level. We would be rid of this ludicrous system whereby neighbouring clubs barely communicate, because one is a National League team, whose only off-field interaction is with other National League clubs at their forum, and the other is a District League cub, which attends the District Forum.

And, while we are at it, having the bigger semi-professional clubs speaking directly to BTM and the smaller, community clubs speaking via the SJRU would sort-out another bug bear with the smaller clubs.

As it stands, and, as Keith Wallace's excellent article demonstrated, Super-6 will hoover-up a lot of ambitious and gifted players from smaller clubs, with no guarantee of present players who are discarded as being, not good enough, or ambitious enough, or able to give sufficient time from their day jobs to be semi-professionals, going in the opposite direction.

So, if the S6 clubs are going to raid the community clubs for new talent – let them pay compensation. Let's have an internal transfer market, so, the compensation a club such as my own one of Cumnock might get, from sending a promising young player to Ayr, can be spent in keeping the club's grass-roots work going, to produce more good players.