Richard Bath reveals that despite the national team improving out of sight, rugby in Scotland is in fact in a dire state.
In Scotland, for so long the biggest loser from rugby going professional in 1995, the situation looks rosier now than at any point since the country last won the Grand Slam in 1990 and then reached the World Cup semi-final in 1991.
After almost three decades of decline in which the only fleeting respite was winning the last Five Nations title in 1999, the game in Scotland finally appears to be turning a corner.
Since Kiwi coach Vern Cotter took over the reins of the national side in 2014, the game has been on an upward curve.
After a whitewash in Cotter’s first Six Nations in 2015, the next year Scotland won two matches to finish fourth, and in 2017 won three matches to again finish fourth.
In the 2015 World Cup, Scotland were seconds away from a semi-final only to be denied by a poor refereeing decision against Australia.
When Cotter left for Montpellier, he did so as the first Scotland coach with more wins than losses.
Under Gregor Townsend, Cotter’s successor, Scotland’s improvement has continued. Last year they beat England and finished third in the Six Nations with three wins. In addition Townsend’s Scotland beat both Argentina and Australia home and away (defeating the Wallabies 53-24 at Murrayfield).
On so many fronts, Scotland appear to be making serious strides. For the first time, their two professional sides, Glasgow and Edinburgh, both look as if they will qualify for the knockout stages of the Pro14 and Champions Cup.
At the Under 20 level, Scotland were fifth at the 2017 Junior World Championship, comfortably their best ever finish.
On a financial level, things are also looking rosy. In 2014, telecommunications firm BT paid £20 million (NZ$40 million) to sponsor Murrayfield and the domestic league and cup competitions for four years. Attendances for professional rugby are up too, both at club level and for Murrayfield internationals, with all six being sell-outs for the first time ever in 2018.
In 2016-2017, turnover broke through the £50m (NZ$100m) barrier for the first time, with the union’s average debt now below £5m (NZ$10m) for the first time in decades.
So you might think that everything in the world of Scottish rugby could not be better. If so, you’d be wrong.
What happens at the top end of the game is incredibly important, of course, but in the long-term the health of the game in Scotland is also determined by its vibrancy at the grass-roots. Here, the picture is altogether more problematic.
By the all-important metric of playing numbers, Scotland have always struggled. Although they once had more than 200 clubs, the game has always leaned heavily upon the private school system and the Borders. That worsened after the strikes in state school in the 1980s, when many teachers stopped supervising extracurricular activities.
The pool of young players narrowed yet further as state schools in places such as Kirkcaldy and Greenock which had always played rugby simply stopped doing so.
The results took a while to filter through, but when they did the impact was worse than anyone had imagined.
On one mid-season Saturday in the late 1990s, the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU) conducted a census to determine the number of adult men playing rugby: the answer was just 4,000, far less than expected.
Despite the alarm bells – not least because funding from government is partly dependent upon player numbers – numbers have continued to drop. The situation is now sufficiently dire that after the union’s AGM in August, the Scottish Rugby Council Standing Committee on Governance, independently chaired by Gavin MacColl QC, was asked to come up with recommendations to combat the alarming drop-off in participation levels amongst adult males in Scotland.
Many prominent clubs that once ran
several teams now struggle to raise a single side.
Howe of Fife, a National Division Two club which used to run several sides, is a good example.
Last year things got so bad that when their 2nd XV could only raise 12 men (10 of whom were over-35s who answered the call) they were beaten 172-0 by Blairgowrie, with the referee stopping the mismatch 20 minutes early. This year, for one cup game Howe’s first team only had 16 players.
There are mitigating circumstances (the club once got players from nearby St Andrews University but they are now compelled to play for their university) but this is a well-funded club which recently finished its new £1.3m clubhouse and training facilities.
Nor are Howe alone. Other wellestablished clubs like Morgan Academy FP, Madras and Panmure in the same division as Howe IIs have had difficulty fulfilling first team league fixtures.
Morgan suffered two 100-point defeats last year while Panmure (established 1880) had to pull out of a fixture last season because of a lack of numbers.
Madras, in St Andrews, depend so heavily on army personnel from nearby Leuchars that they had to scratch one match when units were on manoeuvres.
It is the same throughout the country, and nowhere more so than in the game’s Borders heartland.
Here, several feeder clubs for the game’s most storied clubs – junior sides like Hawick Trades, Hawick YM, Gala Star and Gala Wanderers – have either folded or been absorbed.
For celebrated Scotland and Lions prop Iain ‘The Bear’ Milne, the problem is a professional union focused only on the professional game which has forgotten that the game is a largely social one played by fat guys wanting a few hours with their mates on a Saturday afternoon.
“They [The SRU] have to realise that most of the clubs now are on their knees,” wrote Milne to great acclaim on The Offside Line website.
“We’ve got to have a great cultural change going back to what rugby was all about. Historically, it is a unique sport in that it is not based on excellence but the attributes of discipline, respect, honour and trust – which actually create the clubhouse atmosphere whether you are 18 or 58, a builders’ mate or a high-powered lawyer – it is a great way of bringing people together.”
Sadly, the picture is also worrying at schools and youth level. My two sons went to The Edinburgh Academy, which has produced more Scotland rugby internationals than any other school (it’s also the alma mater of this august magazine’s editor, where he was a dashing first five-eighths) and is still in the top conference comprising Scotland’s six best rugby schools. But where the academy traditionally put out multiple sides in every year group, now it struggles to put out two (as do all but the biggest schools, resulting in regular late call-offs or uncontested scrums).
This is not an aberration, but a scenario being played out all over Scotland. It’s been made worse by the decision to make clubs and schools both play on Saturday, when clubs used to play on Sundays.
The result? Those really keen kids who routinely played two matches every weekend (as I did) must now choose between club and school, again resulting in unfulfilled fixtures.
Of course, Scotland is being buffeted by societal trends and declining playing numbers bedevilling all nations; it is less able to cope because its player base was so small in the first place.
This SRU certainly hasn’t helped (this column is far too short to even list the union’s ham-fisted relations with Scotland’s non-professional clubs), but then the union now sees its job primarily as developing the game’s professional tier.
The three main policy makers – an English chief executive still not resident in Scotland who told startled club committee members that “I don’t go to club games, I have people to do that for me,”; a Celticmad football fan doing the numbers; and an Aussie totally unfamiliar with Scottish club rugby as director of elite rugby – see their job as making Scotland successful so that they can collect sponsorship revenue and gate-receipts. In fairness they have been effective at that.
However, there will be a price to pay for the insufficient appreciation of the long-term damage being wrought by the falling numbers of players, administrators and referees (a Scot hasn’t taken charge of a Six Nations match since 2002).
Will Murrayfield still be full in 20 years given the lack of ex-players? How many home-bred Scots will wear the thistle if playing numbers continue to collapse?
That latter question has already come into focus. When in November 2018 World Rugby vice-chairman Agustin Pichot controversially listed the number of players who played in the November internationals but who were not born in the country which they were representing, Scotland – who comfortably topped the list with 46.3 per cent - were on his mind. With just two professional teams (would there be enough good young Scottish players to support more?), the number of players who qualified on heritage or residency rather than coming through the Scottish system has sky-rocketed.
When Scotland played South Africa in the Autumn of 2018, for instance, eight of the starting XV and five of the eight replacements grew up playing their rugby outside of Scotland: one in Ireland (Tommy Seymour), one in Australia (Ben Toolis), six in England (Huw Jones, Sam Skinner, Hamish Watson, Ryan Wilson, Ali Price, Chris Harris), two in New Zealand (Sean Maitland, Simon Berghan) and three in South Africa (Allan Dell, Josh Strauss, WP Nel).
The irony is that currently a good crop of young Scottish talent, with players like Blair Kinghorn, George Horne, Matt Fagerson and Magnus Bradbury are emerging through the academy system.
But the worry is that without some serious attention being given to the club game, these talented players may not be the tip of the iceberg – they may actually be the iceberg.