THE target of the Scottish rugby team winning the World Cup has been scrapped in the latest version of the governing body's strategic plan.
Instead of being told that nothing other than the trophy would do, Vern Cotter's team has been told that in 2019 the target has been scaled back to the the semi finals – equalling Scotland's best-ever World Cup performance in 1991.
The Scottish Rugby Union are bound to point to how close the current side came to achieving the new target last year, and will claim that makes it a realistic ambition if the side keep making improvements.
The new strategic plan is a significant climbdown by the SRU, who spent a lot of time in the years between the release of the last strategic plan and the World Cup trying to play down the ridicule being heaped on them after claiming that a side that had failed to make the knockout stage in 2011 could be champions just four years later.
In fact the whole document, hidden away in the middle of the annual report, which has been released ahead of the Annual General Meeting on Saturday, represents a winding back on the all far-fetched ambitions spelled out in 2012. Some of the goals they have retained, such as winning the Six Nations in the next four years, are unlikely but are not fantasy.
As a result of scaling the targets back from Cloud-Cuckooland to real world, we see the world ranking goal dropped from top six to top eight, the European dimension to the Glasgow and Edinburgh targets being axed altogether – possibly a recognition of the financial gulf that is growing between the Guinness PRO12 clubs and the ones in France and England – and there are no specific numbers on the general drive to get more people involved with the game.
The sevens team, which, despite the success of rugby at the Olympics, still faces an uncertain future, is also dropped from the targets but the women's game is added to them, with an ambition for the national team to reach the top 10 in the world by 2020 – they are currently 13th but a long way behind the top 10.
The report paints a mixed picture of the success of the last set of strategic targets. Most of the business ones have been achieved, with the union reporting that they have increased turnover by £3.2m and have made a profit of £836,000 with the average debt dropping to £8.5m.
So the union is basically in a sound state financially and though they missed their targets on attendance at Edinburgh and Glasgow games, there has still been a healthy increase in both and all the goals have been hit when it comes to the cash cow of paying spectators at Test matches.
On the downside, they are a rugby organisation as well as a business and on their core function of breeding rugby success they hit only three of 15 individual targets – the passes coming from Glasgow's PRO12 successes, Edinburgh's European Challenge Cup final and the recruitment of 3834 club coaches, well ahead of the predicted 2658.
Despite all the optimism that is included in the annual report, there is also a warning from. Mark Dodson, the chief executive, echoing his counterparts in Wales and Ireland by warning that the growing financial strength of club rugby in France and England is going to put pressure on the Celtic nations to recruit and keep top players.
"We must be creative in finding ways to generate new income streams and still fund the domestic game appropriately," he writes in his report. "This will be one of our biggest challenges in the coming years."
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