Losing control of Europe to the English and French clubs . . . was inevitable. Blackmailing the players with threats to their places will not work

denial that rugby union was, that very year, in the process of opening up to professionalism. Horribly wrong-footed and out of touch, the SRU has unsuccessfully been trying to catch up ever since, hence this latest desperate bid to find new ways of generating money for the struggling professional game.

That comes just as we have been provided with the latest demonstration of how professional rugby should have been run in the Celtic countries, albeit the surrounding circumstances could hardly have been more tragic.

It could have gone the other way last weekend had the men of Munster been overwhelmed by their sadness over the loss of Anthony Foley, their captain on the day they first won the Heineken Cup and began a sequence of successes for Irish rugby which confirmed that provincialism was the right way to compete for countries that are a fraction of the size of England and France.

Perhaps the emotions got the better of one of those who had played longest with Foley, resulting in Keith Earls’ red card, but the way a side that has been in decline for the last couple of years, then coped with having to play for more than an hour a man short was the latest evidence of just what can be achieved when spirit is galvanised as it has been in the Irish professional game.

Rugby union turned professional the year I covered my eighth Scotland – Ireland international. Another five would be played before I saw Ireland win one, in Millennium year.

Professional rugby was the making of the Irish game which had previously revelled in its amateurishness as most memorably encapsulated in the quote attributed to former IRFU President Noel Henderson: “While the state of British sport may be serious but never hopeless, the state of Irish sport, although usually hopeless, is never serious.”

How we might best sum up Scottish rugby over the past 20 years, set against those measures, might best be left unsaid. However just as events in Limerick last weekend spoke so well of the Munster rugby community so, as the go-ahead is doubtless given to put ‘for sale’ signs up at Murrayfield once more, it is good to be Hull-bound looking forward to a sporting encounter that will likely be a mismatch, but will see players in Scotland jerseys giving everything they have for all the right reasons. TOMORROW Susan Egelstaff