THERE WAS an early start to the new week when, on Monday, Pete Horne announced the Scotland A team, which will entertain Chile, at The Hive on Saturday.
It may only be classed as an A game, but Pete still has the luxury of picking 13 full caps for the match, which demonstrates the squad depth with which Gregor Townsend is now operating. The team is:
While the starting XV consists largely of the tried and tested, it is good to see Martshall Sykes' rumbustious form for Edinburgh this season recognised; he and French-based Euan Johnston will form the sort of hard-grafting boilerhouse pairing we need.
I think too, Edinburgh coach Sean Everitt will be closely watching how our back row goes in the game.
In the backs, the fact that Aaron Reed is getting a run-out at full-back, while Matt Currie is on the wing, emphasises, while we have strength-in-depth in some areas, we are a bit short in back three players able to step up.
It is not a surprise to see the younger Tuipulotu being blooded in the centre, alongside Captain Stafford McDowall while, on the bench, the meteoric rise of young lock Jare Oguntibeju continues apace.
It will not be an easy game, but I reckon this squad is more than capable of producing a positive result, to set the big team up nicely for Sunday's challenge of Australia.
BACK IN THE DAY, I was heavily involved in Scottish Basketball, at a time when it was big. Our wee club, in order to compete at the sharp end of the Scottish League, had to import a couple of American players each year. Some of these were good guys, one or two met the alternative Chewin the Fat description but, they added colour and pizzaz to the game.
Generally, the Scottish clubs imported big centres – we had small ball handlers all over the shop, one or two reasonably-sized “leapers”, but, you don't get many guys six foot eight or taller in Scotland, and those we did have tended to be like skelfs, while the American imports were generally built like brick shit houses.
We discovered that this wasn't all down to genetics, one or two had been built-up by their college Strength and Conditioning teams (back then we had to look-up S&C, it was an unknown science over here).
Today, even the more-forward-thinking of our Arnold Clark Premiership clubs have S&C specialists in their back-room teams and our players have got the message of the need to prepare properly. But, I wonder if we are doing it right.
OK, we see lots of film and video footage of our professional players pumping iron, but, I have to again ask: are we doing it right? Because I sometimes feel, our big men up front don't make the same dent in the opposition's defensive line of players from elsewhere and, as I have been saying for some time, Scotland's MAC (Metres After Contact) figures seem down on – in particular – those of the Southern Hemisphere nations.
Another area in which I feel we are lacking, is in bulking-up our props. Sure. We have a long and proud history of technically-superb, and very-strong wee men, who could get underneath bigger props and make life difficult for them – guys such as Hughie McLeod, Ian McLuchlan, David Sole and Tom Smith come to mind.
But we have never, Mattie Proudfoot (a South African import) apart, produced the sort of “whales” - 20 stones-plus individuals seen in the colours of other nations. Against this, we have produced some big, highly-mobile props, such as the legendary ABC – Sandy Carmichael.
The first time I set eyes on Sandy, in a transport cafe at Harthill, while he was working on the M8 motorway, I was suitably impressed. Back then, because at six foot three he was a lot bigger than every other Scottish prop, in fact, either Bill McLaren or Brian Meek, suggested in a newspaper column, that the SRU ought to be looking seriously at converting one or two of the many six foot three inch second rows we had at the time, into props.
Maybe today, half a century or more later, we should re-examine that suggestion with some of the many six foot four or five locks we seem to have. Get them into an organsied S&C programme, bulk them and power them up, and we would in time have the pack we need to take-on the bigger nations.
I appreciate we've had S&C programmes before, which saw Under-2o players spending a lot of time in the gym, to the detriment of the playing time we got. We don't have the numbers, so, we have to be a lot smarter than we have hitherto been in our player development programme.
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