With the Scottish Students having just reached the semi-finals of their World Cup and their senior counterparts preparing to build on their recent heroics when they, too, head for a World Cup in Australia this year, rugby league in this part of the world might appear to be in burgeoning health.
However, officials are having to fend off difficult questions because of the collapse of the league competition they had reintroduced this season, which in turn had led to the folding of their champion club.
Bad enough in itself, but the implications for the national team could not be more serious. For many years Scotland Rugby League (SRL) have been failing to fulfil the criteria laid down by the sport’s international authority and the dispensation granted, largely due to the performance in 2013 of a Scotland team almost wholly comprising second and third gener-ation expats, is set to run out following this World Cup.
Aberdeen Warriors’ decision to fold came just weeks after their head coach Craig Parslow was talking excitedly about entering the club into the lower echelons of the English-based leagues on a semi-professional basis.
The announcement, issued on social media last week, could hardly have been more terse: “…it has been decided by the club’s committee that in light of recent events and lack of support Aberdeen Rugby League Club has no choice but to fold.
“This has been a very difficult decision to make so we would like to take this opportunity to thank all our staff, players and supporters for being a part of the club over the past seven seasons.”
The decision appears to have been prompted by the lack of opposition with sides in the four-team league that SRL claimed was a significant step towards meeting the international requirements, having failed to fulfil fixtures.
A four-team league was not in itself sufficient; full member status of the Rugby League European Federation (RLEF) included the requirement that there is a national league involving a “minimum of eight open age teams, each playing a minimum of six regular season matches”.
Scotland has long fallen well short of that and the tone of the social media response to Aberdeen’s announcement was best characterised by the poster who pointedly observed: “I hope the governing body have a look at what’s happened and stop hiding behind their smoke and mirrors stories.”
That seemed a clear reference to the emphasis placed on the representative scene which brings with it the opportunity to be involved in the glamorous elite end of the game for administrators.
However when contacted in Australia where he was with the Scottish Students, Keith Hogg, chairman of Scotland RL, played down any threat to the organisation’s full member status of RLEF.
“Of course we should be concerned but what I am saying is that it is not a black-and-white subject,” he said.
“We must respect the targets and work hard to get to them. Aberdeen is very obviously a backwards step but there are other things that are positive for the future and it is the actions that you are taking that are a key part of all this, not just the hard numbers.”
He cited a number of representative initiatives they were undertaking, as well as work at youth level and in the wheelchair game.
“No one in the wider rugby league world and in SRL is under any illusion that we have a very difficult task to get rugby league established properly in Scotland and it will take some time but if we keep doing the right things we will get there in the end, whilst having some disappointments like Aberdeen along the way,” Hogg observed.
In terms of the credibility of the sport in Scotland and beyond much would now seem to rest on how those assurances are acted upon and received.
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