Be Very Worried - This England Team Is Good

YESTERDAY'S English demolition of France has me worried, on two counts. The first and most-obvious is, having now beaten Ireland away and France at home, this English team has to be considered both good, and dangerous – and given how we tend to reserve our worst performances for Twickenham, already I am worried.

But, of more-immediate concern is France. They had one good half against Wales, then collapsed; and if they didn't collapse against England, they still played some good rugby in finishing a poor second – and their younger players certainly appear to have something about them.

Vern Cotter - rumours of an approach from the FFR

“The real France,” as they say, is more than capable of turning up an giving us a real roasting in Paris. And, looking further ahead, there are suggestions, the FFR, their governing body, are maybe looking to offer Stern Vern Cotter the chance to work on the French, the magic he worked on us. Ah'm starting to feel a wee bit feart about the remainder of this Guinness 6 Nations campaign.

We will really need to up our game considerably to get anything from the three remaining matches, and we certainly cannot afford to replicate the mistakes we made all over the park in losing to the Irish.

The current week is the fallow one in the 6 Nations calendar – apart from Finn Russell, who will go back to Racing 92, the Scotland squad are, aside from a PR exercise public training session at the new Clydebank Community Sports Hub on Wednesday, having a break – although some of the fringe members of the squad will surely see action for Edinburgh and Glasgow in the Guinness PRO14 over the weekend.

This is also a weekend which sees the club game emerge from hibernation, with the four Scottish Cup quarter-finals taking pride of place on the calendar.

THE WEEKEND just past was not a good one for our representative teams. The record read: played 6, won 0, drawn 1, lost 5. The full National side, the Under-20s, the Women, the Students and the Police (who lost to a combined Garda and the Police Service of Northern Ireland team) all lost.

This left the Club XV to uphold Scottish honour, with a 19-19 draw with their Irish counterparts in the second leg of the Dalriada Cup, at Donnybrook. However, having lost the first leg, at Netherdale, the Club XV had to surrender possession of the impressive lump of silverware.

At this stage, I could, of course, trot out that old chestnut about the Club XV being drawn from the Tennent's Premiership, that competitive field which is supposedly not fit for purpose, but, on this occasion, I will refrain from this.

However, I will not refrain from suggesting – we are not making the best use of the talent we have in the Premiership for representative games.

 Blair Macpherson and Craig Gossman, two of the Club XVs stalwarts

Why does the Club XV only play the double-header against the Irish? Surely, with a bit of effort from Murrayfield, we could resume playing against the best of the equivalent players in England, France, Italy and Wales. To my mind, these guys deserve the chance to measure their level of play against that of their equivalents elsewhere.

What will happen next season? That's another question. Super-6 is kicking-off, as a “performance” competition, designed to under-pin the two professional sides. Will next season's Club XV – assuming there is one – be drawn from the six clubs, from the Championship, which will replace the Premiership, or a mixture of both?

Or might that change be sufficient excuse for the Murrayfield High Heid Yins to quietly drop the notion of recognising the best of our club players, who, regardless of how and how much they are paid – as some are – just want to play rugby to the best of their ability.

I NOTICED a wee “Good News” story this week. Lanark RFC are back in-training and looking to build-up numbers for a return to the West Regional League, if not next season, then certainly in season 2020-21.

This is terrific news, particularly for SRU Board and Council member Willie Gardner, whose home club is Lanark, and who I know was deeply wounded when the club was forced to drop out of the League.

Willie Gardner - delighted that Lanark are fighting back 

Good luck to everyone at the club, Lanark used to be a very hard place to go and play and I hope they can get back to that level.

I see too, Millbrae has been kicked out of West Region Division Two, for failing to play too-many games. Now, that is embarrassing – for Ayr. There they are, one of the pace-setters in Super-6, but, unable to keep their associate “coarse rugby” team going.

I have always seen Millbrae as “A club within a club,” a concept which is not new at Ayr. They are perhaps the successors to the original Ayr A2s, and, while I hope they do not take this the wrong way, to the legendary “Gay 2s/McEwan's Marauders” of the 1970s.

The “Gay 2s” moniker was in no way a suggestion that the team members “came on at the pavilion end,” but was a reference to their legendary captain Desmond Jacques Nouvel – the campest man in Scottish rugby.

The uber flamboyant Des was a bloody hard prop, English Rose mother, French father, who had gone to Dulwich College and worked in the family fashion business, where being a bit camp was considered an asset. I always reckoned, Freddie Starr's brilliant camp act was based on Des.

Nouvel eventually returned to London, where, the last I heard, he and his third wife were running a bijou small hotel in West London. Any way, his Gay 2s really did have a gay old time – in the more-traditional sense of the word, a legacy which, at their best, Millbrae carried-on.

I sincerely hope, Millbrae can be revived, if not, that Ayr might quickly restore the A2s legacy. It is not right that so-many guys, who could still be playing, are happy to turn up on a Saturday to watch the first team then have a good bevvy, without having worked-up a thirst on the park.

The original Ayr A2s comprised several very-good players, forced at a young age to take over family firms. They were still good enough to have played for the first or second teams, but, didn't have the time to train. A couple of the forwards had played for Glasgow and they simply turned-up and had a run about on a Saturday, scoring for fun, and, in the process, educating one or two young guys, straight out of school, before passing them up to the first XV. They were indeed, a club within a club; and if Ayr can get that concept back it could pay dividends in the future.