Celtic’s 5-0 humbling provides timely warning for future of Scottish rugby
It’s not so long since starting the season with a couple of wins against Welsh and/or Irish sides would have had coaches of Edinburgh and Glasgow wearing grins as wide as the Cheshire Cat’s. But times have changed, expectations with them, and both Richard Cockerill and Dave Rennie were disappointed with their team’s performance, decidedly more disgruntled than gruntled.
Well, this is doubtless a good thing. Neither coach is a Scot, though Rennie has the obligatory Scottish Granny, but their response to victory was Scottish in an old-fashioned way. It reminded me of the Aberdeenshire farmer whose daughter presented him with her honeymoon snaps. He studied them in silence, then put his finger on one and said “thon’s the worst”.
Still these are days of promise for Scottish rugby. But for how long? We’ve been reminded this year that 50 years ago Jock Stein’s Celtic won the European Cup. This week in their first match in the Champions League Celtic lost 5-0 at home to Paris Saint-germain, and nobody was greatly surprised. Celtic’s Lisbon Lions were all born almost within shouting distance of Celtic Park; PSG’S players come from all parts of the globe. They are a French team in that the club is in Paris and they have French fans, but, in the post-brexit language they are “Anywheres”, not “Somewheres”. Celtic have their fair number of “Anywheres” too, but not as good ones. They’re by far the best team in Scotland, but earlier in the week their manager Brendan Rodgers said Stein’s triumph would never be repeated – and nobody said “awa’ an’ bile yer heid”.
1967: how was Rugby Union then? Well, it was of course an amateur game, and would remain that for almost 30 years. Almost all club matches were “friendlies”. There was the Border League, but no national league; none in England, Wales or Ireland either. England had a county-championship, Ireland had their inter- Provincial, we had a District championship, but English counties, Irish Provinces and Scottish districts weren’t clubs. Wales had no formal competition, but they did have fiercely competitive clubs.
International nets were spread widely, players being picked from a diversity of clubs, some of them small ones. The Scotland team against France in the first match of the 1967 championship had one player – the great David Rollo – from Howe of Fife and another, Alasdair Boyle, from St Thomas’s Hospital in London. The French XV was drawn from ten clubs, some of which – Angouleme, Dax, Mont-de-marsan, Lourdes, Tulle – no longer feature on international team-sheets.