REGULAR READERS of these rants already know, I frequently flirt with the new Scottish Hate Speech Bill – the SNP Government's latest effort to show the SRU Junta, that when it comes to getting things wrong, the lads at EH12 are mere beginneers - through my criticism of Buddy the Elf and the quarter-wit of the SRU Communications Department.
Well, here we go again, there's more. Apparently the Inter-District Championship kicks-off this weekend; the big showcase for the club game, with the best of the best of our club players going head-to-head. You might think The Junta would be moving heaven and earth to hype this up give it a boost. But, this is an SRU show, so you'd have thunked wrong.
It requires a really deep and forensic examination of the SRU website to find any mention of the games. As I have been saying for years, there are some time-servers inside The Junta who couldn't run a bath – far less help run a sport's governing body.
Assuming we get a competent new Honcho, to replace the departing Fat Mancunian, he's going to go through a broom even faster than dear old Trigger, to sweep out all the deadwood cluttering-up Headquarters.
TO RETURN to the Inter-District Championship – I see the way this has been organised this season as yet another example of the muddled lack of thought at HQ. It's not under the remit of Performance Rugby, it will involve the amateur players, so, the organisation has been amateurish.
Leave aside my criticism of the lack of a sales effort from the elves, I question the timing. Back when the game really was amateur from top to bottom, the Inter-District games served a purpose – in sorting out who really were our best players and getting them ready for the Five Nations, as it then was.
Holding those games in November and December told our best guys it was time to up their game, if they wanted to appear in the International Trials and then the actual Internationals.
When it was decided to bring back Inter-District games, I could see them being a sorting-out tier, to suggest which of the best club players might be worth a punt at Super rugby and perhaps might train-on to get a shot at the professional game.
But, with Super rugby biting the dust, what's the reasoning now? It's not as if we still have a Club XV, a team where these games could be a good sorting-out level. So, reasons for holding the event, spurious in the least, timing questionable, sales effort from Murrayfield – it's coming across as yet another example of: if the SRU can mess something up, they will.
I don't see many spectators, other than family and friends, showing up at either Stoneyhill, for Edinburgh v The South or Braidholm, for Glasgow and The West v Caledonia Reds today. A bit more thought required for what could, if properly set-up, be a welcome return to this level of rugby.
CHATTING last week to one of the pillars of that influential segment of the Scottish Rugby family – a farmer, he was having a good old moan about global warming, Well, not exactly global warming, more the fact we don't get hard winters these days, just rain, rain and more rain.
“I've got 500 ewes due to start lambing any day, and no dry fields to put them out into to ease pressure on the lambing sheds,” was his complaint. This coming on top of having to get his new crop of calves out as well.
The poor old bugger is down to his last two Ranger Rovers, so I had to sympathise with his predicament. However, it got me thinking, I remember back at the start of this millennium, that erudite St Mirren manager Tom Hendrie, a man who, with an Honours Degree in Mathematics, was far-too clever to be running a Scottish football team, saying the problem this century would be field drainage rather than frozen pitches. That with global warming, getting rid of the water would be the bigger problem.
Given the problem Hendrie's first club, Dundee, had at the weekend with a pitch which turned into a bog, the scholarly Mr Hendrie was indeed a visionary.
There are still, certainly further down the food chain, a lot of league games still to be played-off in rugby this season, and already the club season has been expanded into May.
This came up on the blog's think tank discussion earlier this week, with one stalwart of the club game suggesting, that while it would bring its own problems, maybe there was merit in changing the seasonal dates to get us away from the worst of the wet weather.
Mind you, this is Scotland, if we did go to something like a March to November season, monsoons would suddenly start happening up here in mid-season.
BIG DAVID BARNES is really doing a marvellous job in covering events inside the whacky world of Scottish Rugby via The Offside Line. He came up with a cracking two-parter this week, a “round table” discussion on the possibilities around the new Male Performance Pathway.
I commend the articles to the House; several very-good and valid points are raised in it and it will certainly provoke debate around the clubs. Of course, we will not have any indication of the eventual road map, until the new Performance Director is in situ, and has had a look around at the car crash he/she has inherited. So, I fear any improvement will not be immediate.
Ruminating on where we go from here, I had (having what is termed “a left brain”) a “left-field” thought. Given how jealously we Scots guard our Clan lands and areas of intereest; so I thought: why don't we take as our template, the relationship between the “Major” and “Minor” Leagues, in Baseball.
In “America's Game” - it's all about “The Majors” “The Show” - the likes of the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers and the other massive teams who compete every year to become World Series winners. But these 30 clubs in the Major Leagues, are the tip of a huge iceberg.
For instance, each Major League club has a feeder club playing at one of six levels of Minor Leagues:
Triple-A
Double-A
High-A
Single-A
US Rookie
International Rookie.
There are strict rules in place as to what players can play at what level of Minor Leagues, and, particularly in the first four levels of leagues, each of the 30 Major League clubs has an affiliate club playing in one or other of the 11 Affiliate leagues across North America.
For instance, each Major League club can have as many as 40 players on the roster, but a maximum of 28 players can be registered as “active” at any point in the season – the rest are injured or on various types of leave. These non-active players also include some players who are playing for Minor League afficilates.
This system ensures, the young talent gets games, alongside and against quality players – stand-out in this company, you have a better chance of making it in the big time. OK, we could not replicate this in Scotland, because in baseball, they play way more than they train, but, by splitting their time between training full-time with the two Academies, and playing for Premiership clubs, aligned to one or other – or better still one of three pro sides, I am sure we could produce a better finished player from our pathway.
We must finally, after some 30 years of Open Rugby, sort ourselves out, or, I can see us falling even further down the ladder than our football team has. But, I acknowledge, overcoming the age-old Scottish problem of clannishness and putting self-interest first, will be an onerous task.
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