SOME 40 years ago I travelled to the Pacific North West and the Rockies to cover a Scotland rugby tour. The SRU had done their homework on likely conditions there in May and June, and as a result they got then kit suppliers Umbro to produce lightweight jerseys for the tour. These were not skimpy, but certainly not as robust as the jerseys worn in the preceding Five Nations.
That all was not well was soon evident. The Scotland XV front row emerged from the first scrum of the opening game against a Vancouver Island Select with their jerseys torn asunder. From memory, the tourists got through 19 jerseys in that one game. A series of late-night telephone calls between the touring party's management and Murrayfield, and between Murrayfield and Umbro, saw a complete set of new, more robust jerseys air-freighted to Vancouver before the second game, against British Columbia – a match Scotland managed to lose from a winning position, plus ca change etc.
I remember one of the travelling Scotland supporters, a former internationalist, seldom seen without his Hawick club blazer on, sitting in the stand at the picturesque MacDonald Park, home of the great James Bay Rugby Club in Victoria, tearing strips off one of the discarded Scotland jerseys and, with all his many years of experience of the Hawick textile trade, describing the jerseys as: “shite, pure shite.”
The reason for dredging-up this rave from the grave story – well I've just read the Macron corporate bullshit about the new 2022-23 and Scotland home kit.
“Eco-friendly – 13 half-litre plastic bottles recycled into every jersey,” all very noble, but, their made of polyester. To me, polyester means cheap and, regardless of the technology involved, I'd rather we stuck with real thread such as cotton.
I also don't like the paler blue collars and cuffs. Scotland strips should be navy blue, with white collars and cuffs. And while I am at it, the stockings should be navy blue, ok, I could live with a white top to the stockings.
Still, I don't suppose this strip will have much of a life, shelf-life or otherwise, we've got a Men's World Cup coming in 380 days' time, so in perhaps less than a year from now, they will be rushing out the new kit for that little bean feast.
BACK when I was a boy, in our wee part of God's County, only poofs played rugby – real men played Junior Football. Back then, we were allowed to ease our way into the new season. The first game in the new official Scottish Leagues, for example, were played on 6 October, 1974; that was the sixth Saturday of the new season.
This date was deliberately chosen, to allow the clubs to play: “long standing friendly fixtures,” such as the traditional September long weekend matches, which allowed top Glasgow sides such as Accies, High School and West of Scotland to go down to the Borders and receive a good kicking, to forewarn them of what was to come later in the season.
Those six weeks gave every club the chance to bed-in partnerships that worked and get used to playing together before the real league grind started.
The 2022-23 season officially kicks-off on Saturday, and it's straight into league or cup action. I appreciate, many clubs have already played pre-season friendlies and most will be ready to go from week one, but, I still feel, we have not got the seasonal structure right for either the clubs, or the greater entity that is Scottish Rugby.
Again I remind the congregation, back in the 1960s and 1970s the 15-a-side season was strictly controlled. No games before 1 September and none after 30 April. If we look at these dates for this season, it still gives us 35 weeks, in which to play a maximum of 22 league games.
Why cannot we play friendlies or regional or County cup ties over the other weeks? And that's before we consider that, in recent years, the season has been stretched-out to include matches in May.
I am sure we can do better.
MY CURRENT bedtime, indeed down-time reading is: 'When Pride Still Mattered,' noted American writer David Maraniss's 1999 biography of American Football coaching legend Vince Lombardi, pictured.
I have only scratched the surface of this 500-plus page in-depth tome, indeed, where I am, the 26-year-old Lombardi is only just starting out as a teacher. But, what has struck me already is the way my noble calling of sports-writing is or was treated in the United States compared to over here.
My mentor, the great Ian 'Dan' Archer was one of the truly-great chroniclers of Scottish sport. But, he knew how far down the journalistic totem pole we sat. “Never forget Commander,” he would caution; “We might think our job is important, but, as far as management is concerned – we write for the comic pages.”
However,
with their prose guys such as Dan, the Daily Mail's Ian
Wooldridge, Hughie McIlvanney, Norman Mair, Bill McLaren and
Frank Keating could lift a simple match report to the
heights of literature as they described a great sporting occasion.
But, few, perhaps only “The Voice” as McLaren was dubbed, became public figures anywhere close to the standing of the great American sports-writers such as Grantland Rice or Damon Runyan, who chronicled Lombardi's short but storied playing career.
For instance, I had heard of the legend of Notre Dame's “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” In his book, Maraniss records, exactly as written, how Rice came up with this legendary handle. He also repeats the tale of how Lombardi became known as one of Fordham University's 'Seven Pillars of Granite. How Chick Young must be regretting not naming one or two Old Firm back fours as: “Fower pun o' mince.”
Sadly, while we still have one or two excellent operators out there in Scotland, I fear the day of the sports journalist as a writer of literature are over. Even our broadcast journalists of today are pale imitations of the likes of Bill McLaren or Arthur Montford – pound shop Archie Macphersons the lot of them.
Mind you, the biggest jings, crivvens, help ma Boab I've got out of my early reading of the Lombardi biography is the realisation, Lombardi and Wullie Shankly, perhaps the two most-quoted coaches in the history of the various forms of football, were born within three months of each other. Lombardi was born on 11 June, Shankly on 2 September, 1913. That was some vintage.
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