A match identified as an opportunity to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their introduction to international competition will now be the most important a Scotland rugby league team has ever played after they moved into prime position in the European Championships.
Saturday's 25-4 defeat of Ireland in Dublin left Scotland as the sole unbeaten team in the competition entering the final weekend which will have them play their only match of the tournament on home soil at Gala's Netherdale against France. "We've already done a lot of marketing for that match and it really seems quite clear that people in the Borders are talking about the game and are interested," said Keith Hogg, chairman of Rugby League Scotland.
"We are very excited about it because we are playing in a rugby hotbed which has a history of producing rugby league players and we are in an even better position than we could have hoped for at this stage."
Barring a freak result when Ireland visit Wales on Sunday, the Scots points differential advantage means they could lose by as many as 17 points to a France side that beat Wales 42-22 on Saturday and still take the title which earns entry into the prestigious Four Nations tournament with Australia, England and New Zealand in two years time.
However with some of the sport's all-time greats to attend at the home ground of a club whose head coach, George Graham, is the only player to have been capped by Scotland at rugby union after first doing so in the 13-man code, there will be no shortage of incentive to finish with a perfect record.
"I was contacted by the son-in-law of Stan Cowan, the Borderer who played in the 1959 and 1960 Challenge Cup finals, and it speaks volumes about the type of people they are that he was wondering how to buy tickets for Stan and his brother Ron [who famously played union for Scotland and the 1962 Lions before switching to league]," laughed Hogg.
"Obviously I told him they would be guests of honour, but he then got back to me and asked me to write to them because he doesn't think they believed him that they didn't have to pay to get in."
Jedburgh's Dave Rose, who also represented Scotland at union before switching to league and becoming a member of the first ever World Cup winning team 60 years ago, will also be there. That victory was claimed by Great Britain at a time when fielding a Scotland team was unimaginable, but while the opportunities now presenting themselves are generating a clamour for places among Australian and English-born players who are qualified through bloodlines, Hogg is excited by the way homegrown players are seizing their chance. "Louis Senter won his second cap on Saturday and David Scott hasn't put a foot wrong, but what made it an even better weekend was the performance of our predominantly homegrown under-19 team," said the chairman.
The young Scots beat Ireland 42-10 in Saturday's curtain-raiser.
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