Black is Black

YOU have to admire the Rugby Football Union. I appreciate the name resonates with the time of that body's inception - when Britannia really did rule the waves, and most of the globe; when there was a certainty around London that here was indeed, the centre of the Universe and that God was indeed an Englishman.

Absolutely no need to put English before the three words Rugby Football Union - of course not, theirs was the only one.

Nearly 150 years later, the world is a much different place. England is a peninsula, the greater portion of a small offshore European island. Of course, the English politicians still think of themselves as running a global power, England still gets involved in global conflicts - but these they can no longer afford, in spite of the input to their treasury from the ungrateful Jocks above them on the map.

The RFU is still involved in the global body running their sport, only, today it is adminstered from Dublin and the Celts, the colonials whom the English once patronised and those damned French, not to mention Argentinians and Italians now seem hell-bent on denying England the say in anything.

But one thing is constant - the ability of the "57 Old Farts" (copyright W Carling Esq) to get it wrong, as witness their convolutions as regards Sir Clive Woodward, their ability to misplace, lose and generally undermine administrators and their frequent ability to make use of something seen in association rather than Rugby Union football - the own goal.

Admit it, let's all laugh at England is a game we all love in the Celtic fringes of this green and pleasant land, but seldom have I laughed as much as during the current furore over England's "away" strip for the forth-coming World Cup.

Bad enough that the strip is black; but it is the basic premis of an "away" strip that gets me.

You would think, somewhere within Twickenham, there was somebody with enough knowledge of Rugby Union practices to say: "Hang on, we don't actually need a change strip - and in any case, in Rugby Union, when there is a clash of colours the protocol is that the HOME team changes (Scotland/France/Italy all wear blue but in the Six Nations the home side always changes).

"If we are, by some luck of the draw, the home side against Fiji in the World Cup, then we will need a change strip, but let's face that hurdle when we come to it".

But no, guided probably by some budding genius in either theirs, or more likely Nike's PR department, a black strip has been produced. This is nothing more than a blatant money-grabbing exercise; the strip produced in the certain knowledge that the poor saps who will follow England to New Zealand for the World Cup will buy the new item in enough quantity to further swell the RFU coffers.

Mind you, I fear that after a couple of days of: "Thanks for the compliment guys" and "Good on you Poms - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" in the Land of the Long White Cloud, the black shirts will be quietly put away and the old white shirts will be back on the pbi's backs.

I see the new shirts will be unveiled in the pre-World Cup warm-up match against Wales - how many on either side will be smashed out of the World Cup in that one? A "friendly" it will not be. In any case - why? It's not as if England need to change. But, once again, money doesn't so much talk as shout. Suppose Wales win - might the "unlucky" black strips be binned?

I cannot help re-calling how, not that long ago, when the touring Fijians turned up to play England at Twickenham, flying in the face of protocol, England insisted THEY HAD TO WEAR WHITE - after all, they were England, and the visiting Fijians were forced to change into a black and white hooped "Barbarians" number.

That's more like it, arrogant England we can all live with - that sort of stuff makes them indeed: 'the common enemy' which has ever been England's role in the sporting life of the world.

Cheap publicity stunts built around money-grabbing "away" strips do nothing to change that mind set from elsewhere around the globe.

Hawick - We Have A Problem

IT IS written in stone, probably in whichever vault the contents of the Scottish Rugby Union's museum currently lie: "A strong Scotland needs a strong Hawick". The Terris have been having a terrible time lately, so has Scotland. So, is there any sign of a new McLeod or Renwick appearing from the mists of Mansfield Park to lead us to the promised land of Six Nations, far less World Cup glory?

Apparently not, if this week's reports from the Borders are true. These tell us of defections from Hawick to Kelso by some players and of others apparently about to set-out on that drove road which leads from the Borders to Edinburgh. This is serious.

Harsh economic times have hit the Borders hard; the market for the top-quality woolens and cashmeres which have for so long underpinned the economy in the dales of the border country has shrunk like a badly-washed cheap sweater. The mills have closed, the sunrise industries which came in have seen the sun set on them and the young are increasingly moving out - an exodus which has also hit the rugby teams which have for so long been the heart beat of the communities.

We hear there has almost been civil war in Hawick for some years now - the green shirt is no longer the be-all and end-all of every Hawick boy.

Some say the rot set-in shortly after Bill McLaren retired from teaching, this view I can understand, the effect a single, totally-dedicated teacher can have on a sport has long been under-estimated and, in truth, McLaren (if he ever could have been) was never adequately replaced.

Also, the expansion of the National Leagues, now thankfully turned around by the SRU's annual meeting, perhaps gave Hawick's smaller clubs notions above their station. Whereas the men who ran Trades, YM and the other lesser Hawick clubs were once content to smooth-off the rough edges, before sending their young men up to try for the green shirt, recently, they have had their own visions of National League success divert them from their long-established and honourable task of bringing through the next generations.

For Hawick's sake, perhaps a retrenchment into regional rugby will see The Greens again become the sole focus of the town's rugby ambitions.

One thing is sure, with the restricted number of truly Scotland-wide league places on offer from August 2012 on, a few big name clubs will find themselves out of the Premiership picture. I don't see Hawick as losing out, but, if Hawick men are happy to move to Kelso, their task in rebuilding the notion of The Green Machine will be that bit harder.

However, I am sure, Hawick will rise again, and when it does - just watch Scotland go.

On Your Marks

THE new rugby season will soon be upon us. The club sides are back in training, just as the professionals have been for over a month. And this promises to be a very important season, after the changes agreed at last month's SRU annual meeting.

This new season is all about one thing on the club scene - securing a club's position prior to the decrease in the number of sides playing nationally from the autumn of 2012.

I am from the school which believes the centralisation of control of Scottish rugby into Murrayfield, which followed the move to professionalism, was a very bad move. It has taken Scottish rugby a long time, too long, to realise this, but I honestly believe a more regionalised approach will finally see Scotland move forward.

It will all depend, of course, on what the clubs decide - but if the Glasgow District clubs get their act together properly by the time the new set-up kicks off in 2012, there could be some tremendous local leagues on the go in the West.

IF THERE is one club facing real challenges in the new season, then that club is Ayr. Skipper Damien "Skippy" Kelly has returned to Australia, Glen Tippett has hung up his boots, Mark Bennett has gone off to France and Gordon Reid has secured a full-time Glasgow contract and certainly, until after the World Cup, will be heavily involved at Scotstoun and Firhill.

Of course, Ayr has a fantastic youth development programme, but, to quote Alan Hansen: "you win nothing with kids". So, recruitment will be a major task for the Think Tank of Jock Craig, Kenny Murray, Billy McHarg and Peter Laverie. But I don't mind betting, they'll pull a couple of crackers out of the bag and if the new boys gel quickly with the solid core of returning regulars, Ayr will still be in the trophies mix come the end of the season. The fact they've landed some potentially cracking British & Irish Cup ties could prove a useful recruiting tool for the Millbrae Men as they fill the gaps.

Oh Ruck!!

FORTY years ago, Ian McLauchlan got on an aircraft to New Zealand as back-up loose-head prop in a British Lions touring party, Gordon Brown accompanied him, as a back-up lock forward.

They returned to Scotland as "Mighty Mouse" and "Broon frae Troon" and life was never to be the same for the two Ayrshiremen. Big Broon, sadly, was taken from us far too soon, but the Mouse still roars and will have to roar again in a week's time, when he presides over the SRU annual meeting at Murrayfield.

With no Chief Executive, the two professional sides under-performing, changes, and not universally-popular ones, mooted for the club game, oh yes, and a World Cup in New Zealand on the horizon, Tarbolton's favourite son is facing just the sort of encounter from which he never shied away as a player. If there was one guy I'd want steering the SS SRU through the present troubled waters it would be the wee man.

Scottish Rugby HAS to change, there is no alternative - we simply cannot go on as before. Gordon McKie has bitten the bullet, most in the game wanted him gone, they have had their wish.

But, the problem facing McLauchlan and the others within Murrayfield's corridors of power is: is there anyone better out there, and if there is, will be sign-up?

We have fannied about for 15-years since professionalism, now we need to stop doing this, stop fighting among ourselves and start putting Scotland first and putting it right.

I HAVE long pondered over the merits and demerits of Sir Clive Woodward. Is he, as he seemed after England's 2003 World Cup triumph - the man with the answers when it comes to rugby, or is he, as he has been portrayed since the 2005 Lions debacle - a power-mad control freak who cannot stop micro-managing and stifles creativity and free thinking?

His background, English-born, shunted north to live in Corstorphine at an early age, then schooled at HMS Conway, a place which, if not quite sodomy and the lash, was geared to producing the men who ran the navy, before becoming the flair player in a Leicester team which wasn't the prettiest. On then to coaching at Bath and with England, making acquaintances (he apparently doesn't do friends) and enemies and equal numbers along the way. A top psychologist could probably get a couple of books out of SCW alone.

Now the internal debate between the NBWs and the ABWs within Twickenham has claimed another victim, John Steele. (NBW/ABW - nobody/anybody but Woodward). And does SCW himself do anything to stop the turmoil - nope. Very strange man, (SCW - self-centred Woodward anyone?)

Steele, if he could be enticed north, just might be the man to sort out Murrayfield by the way.

Ee Lad There's Trouble at t' Mill

IN A year during which the SFA "turkeys" can be persuaded to vote for Christmas and implement the changes which will lose a few of them their nice wee sinecures, soft seats in the main stand and access to the better purveys under the posh seats, the SRU's timing in allowing details of their own wee internal stushie to leak out is yet another example of Scotland's top rugby men dropping the ball under pressure.

CEO McKie has hardly endeared himself to the punters since taking-on the top job, others, more financially savvy than I have told me he's done a good job in reducing the fiscal deficit - problem is, he ought to be doing more to grow the game in Scotland. Also, as I have said before, there are some in high-powered jobs within Murrayfield who would struggle to be voted in as dog catcher in Hicksville in one of the "fly-over" American states in a bad year.

McKie is, apparently, a paper tiger and as anyone with knowledge of national organisations will tell you; if you appoint a paper tiger to the top job, you end up with lots of paper tigers and few real ones. What the SRU needs is someone in there who can lead rugby towards a landscape where it is closer to football in public esteem and interest. We need a salesman, not a cost accountant.

Just about the only people who think that Murrayfield's corporate body is the right management agency for Scotland's professional teams is - Murrayfield's corporate body. The pro teams are like Soviet collective farms, plenty of people on the pay roll, not much being produced.

We can only hope things improve after the agm, later this month and certainly as the proposed changes to the club game - if implemented - kick-in. But, right now, we are in deep doo-da and should maybe stop digging for a wee bit.

SCHADENFREUDE - German concept, much-loved by the Scots, Irish and Welsh, whenever the English muck-up. And, let's face, the RFU have mucked-up big style over this Performance Director job, which is, or maybe isn't, going to Sir Clive Woodward.

Woodward is a sort of well-behaved Neil Lennon, he splits opinion wonderfully. I have to admit, his autobiography 'Winning' is one of the best sports books I've read and his description of how he turned serial-under-achievers England into World Champions is a terrific blue print for any newly-appointed national coach.

However, his stewardship of the 2005 Lions in New Zealand is the definitive how not to, turning him from super manager into one of those blimpish British generals given a bloody nose by the natives in the days of Empire.

It is uncertainty as to which Woodward will return to Twickenham which has as much as anything caused the stushie within HQ which cost John Steele his job this week.

Given the London Scottish connection, should McKie be pushed/dragged screaming/persuaded out of office, if we could afford him - might not Steele be a good call as replacement - it worked ok with Andy Robinson.

APPARENTLY Andy Robinson has lit a fire under Johnny Beattie, whose place in the World Cup 30 is far from certain. Cannot see it myself - form is transatory, class is permanent and the Killer Bees, Beattie, John Barclay and Kelly Brown ought to be our first-choice breakaway trio in New Zealand. We have got few enough class acts that we could leave one at home.

Football's Universal Confederation Kicking Off For Football

FUCKOFF - That's my idea for a logo for a new world governing body for football. Catchy, to the point, says what most of us fans think about the carry-on in Zurich this week, which saw Sepp Blatter re-elected as the Godfather of world football.

If some of my more-hysterical, ie English, colleagues among the fans with lap-tops are to be believed, right now, Sepp is probably striding around a massive planning table in his private lair high in the Alps, looking through the rocket-proof glass at the world below him and muttering: "Unt now, for zhu Engerland, ze days of empire unt global influence are over - unt do not sink ze Scots vill save zhu zis time".

Such time-honoured institutions as the four Home Nations's divine right to individual places on IFAB, the International Football Board, who are the custodians of the Laws of the Game, their similarly divine right to have a FIFA vice-president, these are now under real threat. Jack Warner, the long-time number one threat to these nice little earners for some may be training with the reserves and youths right now, but he hasn't been given his free transfer just yet.

If I was Jim Boyce, the Ulsterman who has only just inherited that British vice-president's seat, I wouldn't get too comfortable. He might be back walking the Shankill rther than riding down it in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes fairly soon.

But, Blatter, if he should decide to have his revenge in this world rather than the next, will be unable to do anything before the IFAB meeting later this year - that is the FA and SFA's chance to build bridges, sort things out and if they are serious, start mucking-out football's increasingly-ranced international byre. That said, before they set-to on this, they might like to sort out their own sorry domestic messes.

I refuse to believe the really big football nations are all happy with Blatter; certainly, some (many?) of these nations are deeply and perhaps rightly mistrustful of the English as well - but, the likes of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Brazil are in the tent pissing out, which is a more comfortable position than England and Scotland's one of out of the tent, pissing in.

Do we have a footballing politician capable of protecting Scotland's interests at FIFA while helping broker the necessary and overdue changes?

The time-honoured situation saw SFA presidents leave office and move onwards and upwards onto the FIFA/UEFA gravy train - which puts George Peat about to board.

Aye well - FUCKOFF right enough.

2001 - A Crowd Estimate

MANY thanks to my old mate Roddy Forsyth, for the above line, which I have shamelessly borrowed from his Daily Telegraph report on Scotland's 3-1 Carling Nations Cup win over the Welsh, in Dublin on Wednesday night.

The ever-sharp Roddy got the idea from the fact 'Also Sprake Zarathustra' or the theme from 2001 - A Space Odyssey was playing as the teams took the park in an Aviva Stadium which looked like a green-painted Ibrox Park in the early 1980s: you recall the joke - they had discovered a design fault, the seats faced the pitch; as the Bears voted with their feet and refused to turn-up to watch a Rangers team which could barely win a corner.

At least two batallions of the Tartan Army made it through the volcanic ash to Dublin, with a third batallion due there for Sunday's Carling show-down with the Republic. (the Tartan Army v the Green Army, in Dublin - that has to be a wet dream for the Guinness marketing department).

I believe this quadrangular tournament can be a good thing, if they get the format and marketing correct. I don't think it can merit using the really big stadia - the Aviva, the three big Glasgow grounds or the Millennium Stadium and, for sure, no British tournament can work properly unless the Celtic Fringes get a chance to have a kick at "the Common Enemy" - you know, Them, Ingerlund.

The timing is also wrong, at the end of the ever-stretching domestic season, we are all footballed out. The Nations Cup could be "a Gunnell" - not pretty, but it can run, but I feel it needs a make-over.

Still, good to see the Scots scoring goals, albeit, as was the case against Norther Ireland in February, at the expense of a poor Welsh side.

MICHAEL Fry, not a journalist I have ever thought of as a fitba man, has penned a very interesting piece in this morning's Scotsman about the Scottish Government's proposals for a crack-down on sectarian behaviour at football matches.

Fry makes some good points, which I hope our MSP's take on board. He also reitterates a thought which I have had myself. After the Old Firm Scottish Cup replay, the UEFA fine on Rangers, the Hearts v Celtic game and the BBC documentary of recent weeks, a band-wagon is rolling to the effect: "something must be done". If there is one thing politicians hate it is a band-wagon rolling without them on board, so they are all scrabbling to put in their pennyworth.

"El Chooky" Salmond wants legislation against sectarianism on the statute book before the new season, which kicks-off in about eight weeks. Our glorious leader has I fear forgotten - law passed in a hurry is generally bad law.

Scotland is still, in many ways a tribal society, particularly in West-Central Scotland. The "Proddies" hate the "Papes", both hate the "Pakis" - heck, in some parts of Ayrshire, Fife and the Lothians, marrying someone from the neighbouring village is still seen as founding "a mixed marriage". In a lot of Scotland, a white girl seen with a black boy is risking extreme censure - we can still be a narrow-minded wee nation, look how the shit hit the fan this week when the General Assembly debated gay ministers.

We've got a lot of problems still, in this 11th year of the third millennium - but nothing gets us more-aereated than the followers of two football teams fighting a (mainly verbal - let's be honest) battle about religion and politics in Northern Ireland. I accept there is some low-level copy-cat behaviour around some other clubs, but the main problem concerns just two teams, whose management will do as little as they can get away with in sorting-out their followers - since sectarianism sells.

We don't need fresh legislation - all it takes is for the SPL and the SFA to call-in the chairmen and chief executives of the two (three if we include Hearts) clubs and tell them: "Our match delegates will be listening, just one instance of offensive chanting at your matches and you will be docked however many points you win in that game." The football authorities should also list what are "offensive" songs and chants - starting with any of the Irish political and religious "folk songs" - these have hee-haw to do with Scottish football.

The clubs then have to crack-down, starting with their official supporters clubs, warning them "We are listening, we will pin-point where the singing and chanting is coming from, and if it's from an area where your members are, no tickets".

By this method, the decent fans would self-police and in very short order the lunatics who were unwilling to change would be chased from our game. What happened thereafter is a government problem, but football could at least say "We've cleaned-up our mess, now you clean-up yours". Simples.

SO Jack Warner and yon big Arab frae Qatar are allegedly on the take - haud me back, ah never kent.

Aye right - when, in one of the most-gloriously indiscreet interviews in the history of sport, back in 2007, John McBeth made a few pertenent observations about some of the people he was set to deal with as the new British vice-president of FIFA, his reward was to be roundly abused by a highly-affronted Mr Warner, Sepp Blatter and the others of FIFA's elite. McBeth, hardly the epitome of charismatic leadership, but for all that a true football man whose dedication to Clyde was most-laudable, was suddenly declared unsuitable for the corridors of power in Zurich, he was dropped like a big stone and England's Geoff Thompson almost fell over his own feet in his haste to get onboard the Zurich gravy train.

McBeth went as far as he legally could in sign-posting Warner as a crook, but no, to Thompson and the FA he was one of the first gentlemen of football. Fast forward four years, Warner in the interim having at the very least lied to the English about his voting intentions towards the 2018 World Cup and when another of the FIFA blazers, the wonderfully-named Chuck Blazer, blows the whistle on him, the FA and the English football press are on Warner's trail with the zest and enthusiasm of the Beaufort Hunt's foxhounds.

As he sits in retirement in his Glasgow home, John McBeth can at least say "Aye well, ah telt ye".