IT WAS right at the start of June, when he announced his extended squad for the Rugby World Cup, that Vern Cotter delivered what remains his only specific statement about the issue of the Scotland captaincy for the tournament. Josh Strauss, the national coach said, would not be the captain. And there might transpire to be two skippers rather than one.
Nearly two months on, we are no further forward. If Cotter has decided on a captain, he has yet to share the name with the outside world.
In a sport which traditionally views the choice of captain as a key factor in the success or failure of a team, the coach’s inaction might come across as indecision. So, too, might the selection of two men rather than one, should Cotter go ahead with that option. In reality, however, delaying the choice until the last possible moment makes sense.
The ruling out of Strauss was a protective move. The No 8 is a leader for Glasgow both on the field and off, but he will only become eligible to play for Scotland on the cusp of the tournament. Given the continuing controversy over so-called project players and other imports, Cotter rightly decided that, for political reasons, the captaincy would be too big a burden for Strauss to bear, at least for the time being.
It goes without saying that other members of the squad who have not been here long will also be overlooked when Cotter gets round to choosing his captain. But that still leaves the coach the bulk of the squad from which to choose. And, while some players would just never seem right in the role, there is still by no means a straightforward choice.
The first difficulty - and it is a happy one to have - is presented by the return to fitness of Grant Gilchrist. The Edinburgh lock was injured just days after being named Scotland captain for the Autumn Tests, and has not played since then. If he was deemed the right choice for the job then, why not now? He has certainly done nothing to suggest he was the wrong choice. He hasn’t had the chance.
But then, Greig Laidlaw took over in the Autumn, and retained the responsibility throughout the Six Nations Championship. Unlike Gilchrist, the Gloucester scrum-half has produced a lot of evidence for Cotter to assess before deciding whether he should be invited to continue.
Both Laidlaw and Gilchrist are part of a relatively small group of senior players from which the captain or captains will probably be selected, but Cotter will not simply decide which of that group has the best claim. Before he gets to that stage, he will have to decide which of them he regards as a probable starter - if not in every match during the tournament, at least in the majority.
Laidlaw, for example, faces increasingly tough competition from the No 9 jersey from his successor at Edinburgh, Sam Hidalgo-Clyne. The Gloucester player may have been by some way the more impressive when the two men went head to head in the European Challenge Cup final at the end of last season, but during Scotland matches Hidalgo-Clyne has demonstrated an ability to inject a higher tempo into the play. The question, of course, is whether, once preferred to Laidlaw, he would be able to do that for the duration of a game rather than for a short spell against tired defences after coming off the bench.
Another issue is the fact that there are still three internationals to go before the final World Cup squad of 31 is announced. Cotter has urged his players to keep up the intensity in training, and has used the internal competition as a spur. If he were suddenly to name one of those players as his captain, thus confirming that player’s place in the final squad, it could demotivate his rivals.
Hidalgo-Clyne himself also faces competition for a place in the squad, from Henry Pyrgos and Chris Cusiter. The latter has captained Scotland before, while Pyrgos has emerged as one of Glasgow’s key leaders. Which one of those four scrum-halves to drop is a decision Cotter will have to make before opting for a captain.
A simple solution to the whole problem, given Cotter has floated the idea of a joint captaincy, would be for him to name both Gilchrist and Laidlaw. It would be no problem if they were both in the same team, as one is a forward and the other a back. And it would allow Cotter to reshuffle his team for the first two matches of the tournament, possibly giving each man a single start.
In an ideal world, the captain of a rugby team is just a first among equals, one of a number of players with strong leadership qualities. Scotland are getting towards that point, but some of their best leaders are still relatively inexperienced in Test rugby. That makes it all the more vital that Cotter comes to the right decision - and justifies his delaying that decision for as long as he deems necessary.
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