IN a few days, with a little luck, Scottish rugby will be celebrating some good news with a win for the national team in Rome. It will not be before time.

Vern Cotter’s squad attract more attention than any other team in the game in this country, and the headlines generated by them have not been positive this year, as they have lost their first two matches in the Six Nations Championship to take their cumulative losing run in the tournament to nine. But those losses have been far from the only grounds for pessimism within the game.

The PRO12 table, for example, makes dispiriting reading. Edinburgh are fifth after last weekend’s defeat by the Ospreys, while Glasgow remain eighth after their win over Munster. The Warriors have two games in hand on most of the teams above them, but even bonus-point wins in both would not take them into the top four. Their hopes of retaining the title they won in such style last season do not look bright right now, and matters are not helped by the continuing problems with the pitch at Scotstoun.

Not only are both of our professional teams off the pace, their prospects for next season are so far not good. Edinburgh, who lost David Denton when Bath bought out his contract in November, will lose captain Mike Coman to London Irish this summer, as well as, among other departures, Matt Scott to Gloucester and possibly Grant Gilchrist to Toulon. (The broken arm suffered by Gilchrist last week, on his comeback for the capital team after a long absence through injury, is just the latest blow for the lock).

Glasgow, meanwhile, will soon say goodbye to Taqele Naiyaravoro, when the Australian wing returns to the Waratahs after just a year in this country. Leone Nakarawa is also expected to leave, for Racing 92 in France.

Gregor Townsend, the Warriors coach, has said that he hopes to sign “a similar level of player” to Naiyaravoro. Certainly, both Glasgow and Edinburgh will recruit over the coming months, but so far their supporters have seen only one-way traffic.

Granted, several key players at both teams have signed new or extended contracts, and the retention of internationals such as Finn Russell and Alasdair Dickinson can only be good news. More big names should follow in recent weeks, with Ross Ford, the Edinburgh hooker, possibly being the next Scotland player to agree to stay.

Many people within Murrayfield like to view such contract renewals as new signings, and you can understand why. If someone is negotiating with you as a free agent and they choose to sign for you, you must be doing something right - particularly if the player in question is a proven international who could easily find a club elsewhere.

Even so, you suspect that to the outside world, and to most supporters, such signings amount to, at best, a successful defence. No matter how welcome holding on to some of your best players may be, it has not in itself made your squad any stronger.

As the list of departures has grown, so has criticism of the SRU for parsimony. In some instances that may well be the case, and rumours abound that relatively minor sums could have kept more than one senior player in the country. Both Edinburgh and Glasgow have cash available, and however they choose to spend it over the coming months, you can be sure that virtually every season-ticket holder would have spent it a different way.

Alas, if only SRU ineptitude were the beginning and end of the problem. In reality, even the shrewdest rugby thinkers and the best business brains in the country combined would be hard put to keep our two teams on an even footing with rivals elsewhere on the continent.

The basic situation can be summed up in two sentences. Jacky Lorenzetti, the president and owner of Racing 92, has assets estimated to be worth more than £400million. The SRU has a debt of just under £10m.

Racing have money to burn thanks to Lorenzetti, who since taking over the club has transformed them into one of the best sides in Europe. The budgets at Glasgow and Edinburgh, by contrast, are minuscule - and besides, the SRU has a lot more to do than simply keep those two teams afloat. Every level of the game needs funded: that’s what a governing body does.

Lorenzetti has his equivalents elsewhere in France and in England, and together those wealthy club owners have created an embryonic transfer market. The bigger that market grows, the more our two teams will be out of their depth.

It cannot have escaped the notice of rugby’s administrators that Scottish football clubs have been left behind in recent decades when it comes to European competition. The three major trophies won by Scottish teams came within a 16-year period - Celtic won the European Cup in 1967, Rangers lifted the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1972, and Aberdeen brought the latter prize back to Scotland in 1983. Since then, nothing.

The amount of money in rugby is comparatively minute, but the imbalance between the richest and the rest is growing apace. So if Scotland win on Saturday, make the most of it. It may be the only piece of good news we get for quite some time.