Oh Lord, It's Hard Being Scottish

SATURDAY night's result at BT Murrayfield was a hard one to take. Of course, as a long-serving Tartan Army veteran, I have recovered from more hard knocks than I care to remember, and, as a versatile veteran of both the football and rugby corps of the TA, I've had more boots to the goolies than most.

Disaster for Scotland, as Beauden Barret gets to Hoggie

Sure, thumpings such as 9-3, or various five and six-goal pastings at football, or some absolute thrashings at the hands of the English or Southern hemisphere Big Three in rugby leave scars. But, the worse scars, the mental ones, are left by those games you know deep inside you, Scotland ought to have won, but didn't – and they take far-longer to heal.

Saturday, definitely comes into that category. It is an old sporting truism, if you don't score when you are in the box seat, the game can come back and bite you – well, we are all due figurative rabies jabs after Saturday, we were not so much bitten as savaged by the fickle finger of fate.

Why, of why, did Tommy Seymour have that rush of shite to the brain and concede that five-metre scrum; if only Hoggie could have got the ball away a second sooner in that late dash; if only the referee, who had I thought a very good international debut, had spotted that cynical Kieran Reid slap down of the ball, instead of wrongly penalising Jonny Gray, right when the All Blacks were on a roll of conceding cynical penalties to keep their line intact.

I don't accept the calls for that yellow card for the aerial challenge on Hoggie turning red. I actually thought the TMO got it right, there were mitigating circumstances which turned it from clear yellow to penalty only. Good use of the extra official I thought. Let's be fair.

Ach! We got less from the game than we deserved, but, we're Scotland, shite happens – too-often to us. Our performance made Zinzan Brooke look like a big fairy with his 60-point prediction, we are in a good place, and, I am looking forward to the 2018 Six Nations.

BUT, being Scottish, the glow soon passes, and, barely 24-hours after the game came the news: Finn Russell is leaving Glasgow at the end of the season.

 Finn Russell - go with our best wishes young man

The sad fact is, Scotland is a poor, wee nation on the periphery of Europe. Too-much of our nation's wealth still flies south at a disgusting rate – even before the Tories and their City of London pals start squirrelling it away offshore. Maybe, some day, when Scotland is free of subsidising England, we will have a government putting in place Irish-style measures which ensure our top sporting talent can remain at home, because they are not being taxed to death.

I do not blame Finn for accepting a big-money offer while he is “hot property”. The life of a top sportsman is a short one; he is, every time he steps onto the park, a heart beat away from a possibly career-ending injury. He has to try to secure his future as best he can.

We forget, Finn is not one of these gilded youths, his potential spotted at 16 and put into a sporting apprenticeship at a top club, where he is positively pampered as he learns his trade. He left school for an apprenticeship as a stone-mason; hard, physical work, often outside in all weathers. He knows how lucky he is to be a professional rugby player and, he knows, if he can make enough money while at the top, he will never again have to pick-up a lump of granite or sand stone, a chisel and a mallet.

Go with our blessing Finn, but, before you do – a wee PRO14 title for Glasgow Warriors, and a Triple Crown or Six Nations for Scotland, would ease your going.

And SRU, that's three members of the Russell family you have lost in a single year – that's carelessness on a grand scale.

YOU may not have noticed, but, the annual battle for the BT Scottish Cup got underway at the weekend. Aye, I know, it was only a club competition, so, why should, or would the SRU bother to try to “big it up”. Just drop it into the weekend of the All Blacks game, nobody will notice any way, seems to be the HQ attitude.

Actually, quite a few did notice. The attendance was certainly down, with more than a few of the “Silverbacks” deciding a night in front of that intellectual challenge “Children In Need” was a better option than watching two of the four best club teams in Scotland going head-to-head in the Millbrae mud.

They were the losers, while there were also cracking ties elsewhere, on Friday night, and again at lunch-time on Saturday, when most chose to play, in order to be finished in time for the international.

We now know how the last eight will line-up. As I have already posted, Ayr came from behind to pip Currie Chieftains, the Melrose juggernaut rolled on over a typically-gritty Jed-forest challenge, while Dundee HSFP's inability to find three front-row forwards in the City of Discovery – was Desperate Dan otherwise engaged? - gave Marr a bye into the quarter-finals.

 An action shot, stolen from Accies' facebook account, from Saturday's cup win over Heriot's at Raeburn Place

The other five places were settled on Saturday. Stirling County, as anticipated, thrashed near-neighbours Falkirk by over 100 points to clinch their spot, while Boroughmuir had a very big and comfortable win over Gala, just the confidence-boosting result Peter Wright has been waiting for. Watsonians' current run of good form continued with an excellent win over Glasgow Hawks on the second pitch at Old Anniesland.

There was a long-awaited win for Hawick, who edged-out Selkirk in a typically hard-fought – not to say high-scoring, Borders derby. “We're on the turn,” said a happy John Thorburn; while, in the closest thing to a surprise in the entire round of 16, high-flying Edinburgh Academical edged-out Heriot's to ensure a National League 1 presence in the last eight.