Quit The Mickey Mouse Thinking And Broaden Rugby's Player Base

ONE of the joys of compiling this blog is the feed-back I get from rugby men and women who share my concerns at the path the SRU appears to be going down in their governance of the game.

There is a tale told of corporate America, and in particular that billion dollar beast, the Disney Corporation, where the motto of the young, thrusting, “suits”, desperately trying to climb the corporate ladder is: “Anything for the mouse.”

 Mrs Bradbury, Scott Johnson and Mark Dodson discuss Stupid 6 and Agenda 3

Well, to me, this determination around Murrayfield to install Stupid 6 and Agenda 3 is Mickey Mouse thinking.

In the wake of my recent pieces on our Under-18 team, and in particular yesterday's piece about the 2009 version of that team, one regular btl commenter wrote:

“Talent spotting is a horrendously difficult activity. We just need to look at football where thousands of kids are whittled down over the years and very few get to be pro footballers. And even then, just a fraction have international level talent.

There is a famous stat from the NFL that illustrates the near impossible task of getting to be a pro NFL player. From just over 1M high school football players only 15k get to NCAA senior level (top level college football). The NFL scout 6500 players. Of these only 300 make the transition to an NFL team and only 150 of them get to year 4 of a pro career.

Knock several zeros of those numbers and we have the reality of sport in Scotland.”

A very good point there. My old school, Cumnock Academy, is slap-bang in the middle of one of the hotbeds of Junior football; the game is almost a religion here, yet for all the thousands of boys who have played for the school team, we only have five full Scotland caps to boast about: Archie Glen (Aberdeen), Eric Caldow (Rangers), George Burley (Ipswich), Craig Burley (Chelsea) and Billy Dodds (Aberdeen). One went on to manage Scotland, two captained Scotland and a third led Scotland B, so, not a bad return.

Billy Dodds (7) is a spectator while Pierluigi Collina speaks to Dodds' fellow Cumnock Academical Craig Burley. Burley was already a star at school, but Dodds wasn't rated back then

But, the teacher who ran the school team for years told me, only the two Burleys were automatic first-picks for the school team.

A distant cousin, several years older than I, told me over the weekend, as we discussed my Under-18 piece, of how two of his school contemporaries got on in the Ayrshire v Glasgow schools trial for the Glasgow Schools XV. The centre scored a brace of tries, and laid-on two more for his winger, the flanker hounded the opposition stand-off to distraction. Neither made the team, the boys from Glasgow Academy and Glasgow High School they had outshone got the Glasgow jerseys. Selectorial bias is nothing new.

Another regular commenter had this to say about yesterday's blog:

“Many of the boys you mention above were Scottish based Club players when they gained their U18 caps; the current U18 squad looks to contain 11 private school boys and 8 exiles, leaving only a handful of Scottish Club based players.

Realistically, how many of the private school boys or exiles are going to be looking for a £99 a week contract with a Scottish based Super 6 franchise?

Professional rugby is now a career in itself, so in this era a question has to be, for those who are going to make it as a full time pro player with potential for earning national honours, can it be combined with studying full time at Uni for subjects like medicine, law and economics?”

These again are salient points. Your Dad is a doctor, lawyer, or businessman with a successful and thriving concern; he is maybe a farmer with a lot of acres. He sent you to Fettes, or Merchiston, or Strathallan, where you got into the XV and then into the national age group squad.

Dad might be prepared to indulge you, his son, and your talent for rugby, but, at some point he will want you to start to pull your weight in the family business. Maybe he's decided to slow down, perhaps Mummy wants to go cruising – or, worse than that, serious illness strikes, and you are needed to quit rugby and run the business?

It's all very well capping gilded youth at Under-18 or Under-20, but, if you want a guy who will commit to a lengthy career in professional sport, he is, I would argue, more-likely to come from the state school than the private school sector.

For all the dominance of the private schools in the Scotland Under-18 squads over the years, a look at the make-up of the Edinburgh and Glasgow squads tells a different story. Between them, the our PRO14 outfits have 62 players who have come through the internal Scottish development system. Of these, 27 or 44% learned their rugby at private schools, the other 35, or 56% went to state schools and were in the club development system.

To a kid growing-up in a Glasgow “scheme” such as Castlemilk or Drumchapel, football is a way out, to make that comparatively short, in distance terms, but vast in cultural terms leap from where they grew-up to nearby Carmunnock or Bearsden. Many aspire to this move, few actually manage it.

That leap is not yet a driving force to our young rugby players, since rugby is still a middle-class sport. Perhaps the SRU should be, without taking too-much away from its traditional areas of strength, putting more resources into trying to make inroads into football's grass-roots areas.

Football's "not good enough" teenagers might be future rugby greats

Increasingly, the big football clubs are sourcing new talent in the primary schools, and ruthlessly discarding by Under-14 level. Who knows, if the SRU better-supported clubs in poorer or working class areas, we might unearth an unpolished diamond whose football dream has already been shattered, and polish him up to become a rugby star.

But, for that to happen, the Union would need to rethink its strategy around “fewer but better”, which seems to be the underpinning ethos of Stupid 6 and Agenda 3.