FINN HAS TO SAY SORRY OR BE EXILED

i try not to be overly partisan in my columns because i love good rugby and admire top-quality play from all teams, but i hope that scotland record a thumping win over italy on saturday. i was sickened by Finn russell’s unjustified and often incoherent character assassination of Gregor townsend last week. it crossed a line and if i was townsend i would issue a simple statement: if russell does not apologise he will not play for scotland while i am coach. i wish the srU would step in first and state that russell won’t play for scotland again regardless of who is coach. Who does russell think he is? As a fly-half he has great talent but is wildly inconsistent and has regularly failed to deliver controlled 80-minute, match-winning performances. He disappoints as much as he excites. russell (below) needs to show a little humility. the scotland rugby team have been playing for 149 years and his part in that history is very small indeed. i was faced with a similar situation with richard Cockerill following the 1999 World Cup, after which he wrote a book. i considered the content to be largely nonsense, in particular the accusation that i was a bully. i asked him for a public apology. He declined, so i banished him from the squad. i told him he would never again play for England on my watch and he didn’t. A really good hooker, Cockers missed out on the World

Cup in 2003 when he was undoubtedly playing well enough to make our squad. i didn’t enjoy taking such a firm line but it needed to be done. there was no word of a dissent in the squad and in fact i felt it strengthened my position, although that is not why i did it. But there is more. in 2005 i was on the board at leicester and had the final say in who we elected as head coach. it was a strong field but i chose richard Cockerill because i believed a maturing Cockers had the makings of a great young coach. And i wasn’t wrong. He phoned me a few days later, thanked me profusely and said that he assumed he would have no chance because of our history. i said: ‘Nonsense.’ Everybody makes mistakes — the main thing is to learn from them and be better. Cockers has done that in his coaching career, with power to add. i was delighted last week to read Cockers come out strongly in support of townsend over russell, citing his own painful expulsion from the England team as a parallel. Cockers understood that no coach can allow a player to behave like that. We have exchanged a couple of humorous texts since.