Some Of The Best Ideas Don't Always Get Discussed

DURING our short conversation, at Balgray on Saturday, Heriot's Director of Rugby Neil Meikle asked me how I managed to find time to write a 1000-word blog piece every day. The smart reply would have been to quote an old Lonnie Donegan line, from 'My Old Man's a Dustman': “Well, when you get to my age son – it helps to pass the time.”

I didn't have much time to pass yesterday, since I was carer to my oldest grandson, currently receiving excellent care from the brilliant and hard-working staff at Ayr Hospital, so, today's blog is a sort of “off-the-shelf” item, I have been meaning to use for some time.

Bill Lothian - even in semi-retirement, he comes up with good ideas

It was inspired by something which Bill Lothian posted on Facebook a week or five back, but, which has, between yesterday's news of the possible big-money sale of English Premiership Rugby, and some recent stuff on here, become relevant. Bill's Facebook post went:

"In my 30 + years as a full time rugby reporter few made a bigger impression on me than Alex Fynn. As Scottish rugby prepares to embrace a ring fenced so called "super" six this is part of an interview I did with the man credited as being the architect of the English football premiership."

 

"Alex Fynn, a sports consultant who has advised the English FA on the setting up of the Premiership, says: "Promotion and relegation is intrinsic because the way we tend to play sport is based on merit. Doing away with the idea of teams going up and down is about self-preservation.

 

"Life is on the side of the big battalions but within a sporting structure we must try and create opportunities for merit to prevail.

 

"A (sporting) structure should be for everyone - big and small.

 

"What must apply is that if you are good enough there has to be a route to rise to the top. Otherwise you will remove the dream factor which contributes so much to spectator interest." 

 

The message from Fynn is that pro sport is heavily driven by parochialism and it doesn't matter how unrealistic a club's ambition might seem in football or rugby their right to try to achieve those aims must be protected.

 

A former director of top advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi, Fynn adds: "The reason promotion/relegation is getting a bad press is not the concept but the fact the basic structures of many of our sports are wrong. The premium should be creating opportunities for as many meaningful fixtures as possible in a season. If that means establishing play-offs, fine.

 

"Also the idea of three up, three down or chasing European spots can also have a big impact in terms of giving sides something to chase to the pleasure of supporters.

"Anathema should be end of season mid-table fixtures. The way current structures can be improved is by a greater distribution of wealth.

 

"This means more clubs being able to come up with a greater expectation of success because a problem arises when teams come up with limited funds which means they go straight down.

"Emphasis should be placed on getting the number of teams in each league absolutely right; that would be a more sophisticated system. Alas, all too often we have an inappropriate number of teams but get that right and everything else has a better chance of falling into place."

There are some interesting proposals in there; let's have a look at them.

Alex Flynn clearly believes on merit-based competition, which goes against the introduction of Super-6. S6 is being brought-in, on a false premise, on a lack of prior research – on a whim in fact. If the SRU genuinely wants to do the best it can for its professional arm, and if BT Murryafield (BTM) HAS TO retain control – then they take all professional player development in-house, to the performance department.

The best solution would seem to be, as the Irish and Welsh are doing – by running professional A teams. Semi-professional teams, still ranked as “clubs” goes against the ethos of professional development. But, by giving these six clubs protected status as franchises, with no relegation, it goes against the ethos of club rugby in the domestic game.

Next-best, for me, would be a “Districts” set-up – perhaps a short, sharp, end-of-season tournament, in which the best club players could go head-to-head to showcase their talent and readiness for a step-up to full-time professional rugby.

 Jamie Bhatti - just one of a shed-load of top players to come through the Premiership. Will S6 do better?

The two professional sides are the “jam” on the jeely-piece of Scottish Rugby. Do we really need a layer of “marmalade” below that. I simply cannot see S6 doing player development any better than the Premiership did for Jamie Bhatti, Allan Dell, Fraser Brown, Zander Fagerson, Simon Berghan, Stuart McInally, D'Arcy Rae, Murray McCallum, Scott Cummings, Lewis Carmichael, Matt Fagerson, Adam Ashe, Matt Smith, Magnus Bradbury, Ali Price, Finn Russell, Charlie Sheil, Sean Kennedy, Nathan Fowls, Chris Dean, James Johnstone, Nick Grigg, Dougie Fife, Rory Hughes, Damien Hoyland, Blair Kinghorn and one or two others I have perhaps overlooked, all of whom have caught the eye in the Premiership.

The basic problem inside BTM today is – too-many of the decision-makers have no concept of what is involved in running an ordinary club, and the ordinary clubs are still the backbone of the game. We hear, for instance, that while the West Stand at BTM, wherein the offices of the “big beasts” are situated, is bursting at the seams, the South Stand, home province of the Domestic Game, has a severe problem with tumbleweed blowing down the corridors. The balance is wrong.

I hear too, some of the newcomers in the new super-dooper “Regional Directorships” or whatever, which BTM seems set on pushing through without consulting the clubs, do not come from rugby backgrounds. Nothing against the strengths which these newcomers might bring but, being able to say: “I'm Mandy – fly me” is not perhaps the best USP to bring to sorting-out the tribal uprisings north of the Tay; while experience in running Highers and Standard Grades might not readily transfer to running a Regional League competition.

By all means, bring in people with a business background, but, at club level, a knowledge of how club rugby works and of the pressures clubs are facing is, I would say, of greater importance.

Our system is flawed. Sort it out – properly by engaging with the clubs rather than by BTM's preferred management method of: “Dae whit we tell ye,” and who knows, we might have the sort of vibrant game Alex Flynn talks about.