Plus Ca Change Etc.? Maybes Aye, Maybes Naw

WHILE researching another piece, by browsing the excellent Google news archive of old Glasgow Heralds, I chanced upon the following Letter to the Editor, dated, 22 March, 1960. It reads:

“Sir,

I have spent the Rugby season up to the present time watching school and club Rugby each Saturday. My last experience of the standard of the game in your country was in 1932, when I accompanied the Springboks on their tour. Quite frankly the standard is lower now than 28 years ago, and failure in Internationals cannot be excused by hard-luck stories but by confession that success in Internationals will never come until these reforms are made.

1. The strength of university football must be raised by giving the universities first call on the undergraduates' services on the sports field. There is no injustice in this right being established as 90 per cent are there on government grants. (The university blue should rank as second in prestige to the international cap. To see how this provides Internationalists take the blues from Oxford and Cambridge who provide the backbone of your International sides in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland – in Ireland's case with those of Trinity College, Dublin, and the colleges of the University of Ireland. Stellenbosch, Cape |Town and Johannesburg Universities form the nucleus of the Springboks.)

2. What is the strength year-by-year of your Border clubs? Surely it is because they build sides on Rugby-playing ability irrespective of the school they originate from. The same applies in South Africa, New Zealand, England, Wales. In fact in every Rugby-playing country other than Scotland.

The tragedy of the low ranking of Scotland in International rugby is the set-up of your sen ior game. You have the talent to build supreme Internaitonal sides, but, it is too widely distributed among too-many clubs to gaint he necessary experience.

Summarising, if your reporters have to stop finding excuses for poor International showing, then Scotland must either withdraw from International games or:-

(a) strengthen her university sides.

(b) make her former pupils sides second-grand standard and feeders for

(c) senior clubs based purely on Rugby excellence, not the old school tie. - I am, etc.,

H HILTON.

2 Park Terrace,

Glasgow. C3.”

You might well think: “These days are past, and in the past they must remain,” but, it cannot be denied, some of Mr Hilton's points are still relevant today, if not perhaps in the same form.

For instance, might not Mr Hilton's final two points: (b) and (c) above reflect what is going on today, where we have those six franchises in the FOSROC Super6 taken out of the club game into the bailiewick of the SRU Performance Department, with their playing squads selected on the grounds of rugby excellence and perceived potential as future full-time professional players?

It is interesting to see Mr Hilton so-strongly advocating the protection of University rugby. This never happened, but, one of the pillars of the S6 franchises is a link between these clubs and a higher education establishment, so, 60-years on, this is finally happening.

Back when Mr Hilton made his observations, certainly in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the former pupils clubs, with their limited membership rules were virtually all-powerful. West of Scotland was the solitary “open” club in Glasgow, with Edinburgh Wanderers in a similar position in the capital.

Mr Hilton, as a visitor to Scotland, was perhaps unaware some of the FP clubs were already easing membership criteria and certainly by the time the official leagues were started in 1973, there were very few FP (if any) such clubs still operating to the strict criteria for playing memebrship of 1960.

However, it has to be said, 60 years on, true democracy in schools/youth rugby has still to be achieved, and perhaps will not be until the one game per weekend rule, so-vigourously defended by the traditional “top” rugby-playing schools is broken.

THERE IS an interesting piece in today's Observer, suggesting one or maybe more English Premiership clubs might go bust thanks to the ongoing pandemic.

I will be amazed if this doesn't happen. Everyone knows the English Premiership is a league waiting to implode. Only Exeter Chiefs made a profit in the last season for which financial results have been released. The Premiership has been unsustainable for years.

Professional rugby will be operating on a totally-changed landscape when we finally get our of the current lockdown regulations. Given how determined the UK government has been to see the English, Northern Ireland, Welsh and Scottish administrations in “lockstep” in handling the current pandemic, might we see, when restrict6ions are eased, the four Home Unions perhaps finally persuading the RFU that a common approach to professional rugby might be the way forward, and we see an amalgamation of the English Premiership and the PRO14?

In fact, I would go further, and look for a northern hemisphere NFL type league. It would take some organising, but, I think it could work. This might lead to more-affordable semi-professional clubs coming tot he fore in the various unions. That way, there would be places for the very best, the potential successors to these top players and the vast majority of players who merely want to play for fun.

However the landscape eventually looks, it will be very different from how it was when we went into lockdown.