If you write about rugby long enough and make predictions now and again, the law of averages says you’re bound to get one right eventually.
When Blair Kinghorn moved to France to play for Toulouse during the season, I felt sure he would be a success in a team replete with stars such as Antoine Dupont, Romain Ntamack and Thomas Ramos – and that’s just the backs. His consistent performances for Toulouse have proven me correct.
He proved his worth to his club at the weekend with a fine performance in the European Rugby Champions Cup semi-final victory over Harlequins. However, the former Edinburgh Rugby man picked up a nasty injury in a tackle from which he emerged with black eyes and a clearly broken nose – the pictures look horrific.
I don’t know what the medical team at Toulouse have planned for Kinghorn but having had a broken nose myself – technically a deviated septum – I would suggest he doesn’t do what I did.
The surgeon in A & E said we could just let it set for now and you can play in a week or two, then we’ll bring you back in a few weeks and put you under anaesthetic then break it and get your nose all nice and straight again
“But you look a big strong lad so I could just fix it now.” I said sure, go ahead, and the doctor promptly grabbed my nose and straightened it there and then. I have never felt anything so painful in my life, so if you’re reading this Blair, just let the schnozzle set and get it fixed during the summer.
Whatever you do, don’t miss the final a fortnight on Friday against Leinster at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. You deserve to be there and it will be a career high in club terms for you.
READ MORE: Sean Everitt looks to ease expectations after Edinburgh sign Tuipulotu
Kinghorn’s ups and downs prove that a professional career in rugby union is no picnic. Players have to take the opportunities presented to them, and Kinghorn was just the latest Scot to ply his trade in a foreign land.
The best players will always be in demand, and as long as they are available for internationals, I don’t think we should stop any Scottish internationalist from going down south or abroad to play a higher level of club game. After all, Scotland head coach Gregor Townsend had a spell in France, and knows that going elsewhere can improve players.
I would much rather they stayed here and played for Glasgow Warriors or Edinburgh Rugby, but our two professional clubs just cannot compete on salary levels with the biggest teams elsewhere.
I do get annoyed when Edinburgh and Glasgow bring in foreign talent that is not qualified to play for Scotland, but that is not the case with Edinburgh Rugby’s latest signing, Australian-born Mosese Tuipulotu whose arrival at Murrayfield was announced earlier this week. His brother Sione has been an outstanding success for the Warriors and Scotland, and though younger and comparatively inexperienced, there’s every hope Mosese can emulate his brother’s success – thank goodness for that Greenock-born granny of theirs. Perhaps he will be like Sione and prove that if he’s given the chances, Scotland might just have signed a real prospect.
There has been much comment about the failure of Scotland’s player performance pathway, but with such limited player numbers, the fact is we need to find talent and bring it here – as long as players are qualified for Scotland. World Rugby now decrees that you have to be resident - have your primary home permanently there - for five years before you can play for a country to which you have no family link, so I don’t think there will be too many professionals queuing up to wait five years to get a cap.
Fixing that pathway and encouraging the grassroots of our sport to find new talent must be the one of the highest priorities of the new chief executive of Scottish Rugby. With Mark Dodson’s severance complete, that chief executive needs to be in place very soon, and I seem to recall the first week in May being pinpointed as the deadline for the new appointment. If it takes a bit longer than that’s fine as long as the right person for the job is found.
May I suggest that one of the chief executive’s first tasks should be to speak to community clubs and schools to ask why more is not being done to encourage youngsters to play the game. They will tell him or her the answer straight away – there are simply not enough resources being put into the foundation level of the sport, particularly in state schools.
Until every state school in the country can offer rugby on its sporting curriculum, we will always be playing second best to the round-ball game and won’t be finding the Scottish talent that I believe could be out there.
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