As a team that is motivated for a variety of reasons by little more than their love of Scotland, finalises its preparations for confronting what is perhaps world rugby’s most professional team, a very different type of gathering will be taking place at Murrayfield tomorrow.
It was one that would have happily passed me by had a former Scottish international player not brought it to my attention that further machinations are underway in a bid to generate money to maintain huge salaries paid to administrators, imported players, the few Scottish players who are good enough to compete professionally in rugby union and a fair number who are not.
“Chickens are coming home to roost,” he wrote.
“The pro league does not have the TV audience to compete with England or France. Losing control of Europe to the English and French clubs and automatic entry to Europe was inevitable and fatal.
“Blackmailing the players with threats to their international places will not work. Even the Lions are only offering £70K for 10 games. The TV rights for this must compare with the Premiership yet average players earn that per week. Battleships and rowing boats come mind.”
Initially the emailed outburst seemed strangely random, but it seems it was inspired by a special meeting called by SRU administrators to make their case for selling off the professional teams, bringing to mind a previous mishandled episode in the history of the professionalism of the Scottish game around a decade ago. As with the SRU’s latest bust-up with English clubs it has too often been all about the money in rugby union over the last 25 years.
Meanwhile those representing Scotland in the Rugby League Four Nations will, for negligible fees, put themselves in harm’s way tomorrow night in their first ever Test meeting with Australia’s Kangaroos, the 13-a-side game’s version of the All Blacks having won more than two out of every three of the close to 400 Tests they have played during the past century and more.
It is an encounter that was hard to envisage when, as recalled elsewhere in HeraldSport today, Scotland’s rugby league pioneers assembled to play their first international match little more than two decades ago.
The bullying efforts made by Murrayfield officialdom to sabotage the attempts by a group of enthusiasts to take those early opportunities to represent their country were ugly and as ill-judged as the predictions by those same administrators who were in 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.
In a different way that is another remarkable example of how things have changed since the nineties. 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.
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