Last week's sacking of Sean Lineen as Glasgow Warriors head coach has had the effect of pouring a bucket of cold water over the heads of the Scottish rugby community as people wakened up to just how bad things are getting.

Had it not been for two late tries by Peter Wright's under-20s last weekend, all three of the national teams engaged in full Six Nations campaigns would have been whitewashed, more than two years after Graham Lowe, the man being blamed for Lineen's removal, was appointed as director of elite performance at the SRU.

It is a pitiful state of affairs which has its roots in small groups of men, based at Murrayfield, believing they know better than everyone else how to run the sport.

We have been repeatedly told that would change yet, when the overwhelmingly negative supporter reaction was put to the SRU executives who have become the latest to do as they please with Glasgow Warriors, the reaction was simply to dismiss their views as a matter of opinion.

If the SRU remained in any doubt about the depth of feeling after the press conference held to try to explain away their decision last week, it should have been wholly erased after the Warriors supporters meeting held at Scotstoun Stadium a couple of nights later.

It had been called by Warriors staff seeking to persuade a representative group to evangelise on the club's behalf by telling them how much better things were going to be next season. Oh, the irony.

The supporters who attended were hand-picked from those who had applied to attend, on the basis that they offered a spread in terms of demographic profile and yet I am reliably informed by Jim Smith, a retired head teacher who was among them, that they spoke with one voice on what became the night's main theme.

Talk about being thrown to the wolves; the Warriors staff who, we were told, were going to be given much greater autonomy to run things rather than be a plaything of the SRU, had arranged this meeting long before any of them knew about Lineen's removal to be replaced by the Scotland attack coach Gregor Townsend.

Having had nothing to do with the decision, the Warriors staff were met with what bordered on hostility as they initially tried to stick to their original agenda before accepting that the meeting had effectively been hijacked by those they had been expecting to wow.

Mr Smith tells me that he asked three simple questions: Why? Why now? And why Gregor Townsend? He said that, with the help of others, he eventually elicited from Nathan Bombrys, the Warriors chief executive whose task it was to defend what most in the room deemed indefensible, the admission that it was "a gamble".

"I told him that I did not buy my season on the basis of a gamble," Mr Smith noted.

Another account of that meeting is contained in the missive from Alyson Wray, published below.

The response to this decision has been the closest thing the SRU have achieved in generating the sort of outrage in terms of public response that is normally reserved for the more contentious Old Firm issues.

Officials have, of course, sought to draw a line under this, including firing out a message which appeared this week, reputedly from Lineen, telling supporters how excited he is about the new job he has been given and asking them to get behind the team. Having sub-edited Lineen's copy for most of the nineties and, from time to time, thereafter, I have to say his writing style has changed . . .

My expectation is, however, that supporters will turn out in big numbers against Aironi tomorrow night and, while there has been talk of season tickets being returned and of protests, I am really not sure that the relatively reserved rugby community has the appetite for making the sort of public fuss of which football supporters are capable.

The SRU has effectively tested just how much the Warriors mean to their supporters and in a sense the club's owners stand to lose either way. If the strength of feeling that seems to have been conveyed so far is reflected in the atmosphere tomorrow it should force them to think again.

After all, while Mark Dodson, the SRU's chief executive, sought to justify making this unnecessary change by noting that it was his job to make tough decisions, it takes a really big man to admit to having made a mistake. Six months into his job his honeymoon period is over and we are about to discover just what sort of man he is.

And Another Thing

This is normally the cheery bit, but to place Scottish rugby's parlous state into full perspective and to point out just what Dodson and his executives should be trying to address, if the national team do not win either of their next two matches they will drop out of the world's top 12.

That, in turn, would almost certainly mean that, with matches against the world's top two, New Zealand and South Africa, to come in the autumn, Scotland would drop into the fourth tier of seeds when the draw for the next World Cup is made at the end of this year.