There was a hint of Sir Humphrey talking to Prime Minister Hacker yesterday as Andy Robinson said of Richie Gray's decision to go to Sale Sharks: "It's a brave choice.
He should be supported in that.” The Scotland head coach was choosing his words carefully as he did throughout a lengthy discussion of the 22-year-old’s move south at the end of the season.
However, the way he expressed his disappointment on behalf of Glasgow Warriors and Scottish rugby was rather different in tone from how he has previously championed the need for players to expand their horizons.
“It’s a shame for everyone that’s been working really hard with him . . . as a national coach I need to support the decisions made whether I agree or disagree with them,” said Robinson.
Other than noting that Robinson said he spoke to Gray in support of the efforts to keep him in Glasgow and that he indicated unhappiness with Sale’s decision to put Ally Dickinson and Richie Vernon on their bench three days after they returned home from the World Cup, no further interpretation of those words seems necessary.
On the wider issue, however, the coach admitted that Gray’s decision to go to what can most generously be described as a developing club, after unprecedented efforts had been made by the Scottish Rugby Union to keep him in the country, serves to demonstrate just how unglamorous Scottish rugby has become.
“It has highlighted for me the work that we really need to do to keep players in Edinburgh and in Glasgow,” he continued. “It’s important. What I like is the reaction and the work that Mark Dodson [the new SRU CEO] has put into investing in the two pro teams.”
For Glasgow, the attention now switches to two more leading internationalists in the shape of Chris Cusiter and John Barclay. Keeping one or, ideally, both is now essential to changing the perception that Glasgow is simply a feeder club, developing players for the English and French Leagues.
Robinson seemed to share the view that Cusiter is likely to want to stay and in many ways his career path represents the ideal from the coach’s perspective. As a young player, Cusiter worked under one of Scotland’s all-time greats in Gary Armstrong, then broadened his horizons with a couple of seasons in French rugby with Perpignan, before bringing all that knowledge back to Glasgow.
On that basis, however, Barclay would seem to be at exactly the point in his career where a move might normally be recommended since, at 25, he has been a professional player at Glasgow for seven years.
Robinson said that was a conversation he has yet to have with the flanker, but added: “When players leave you want them to leave at the right time for both parties, then you want them coming back with what they’ve learned.”
In terms of sending out the right messages to the wider world, however, even more important than keeping players of their quality will be the capacity to bring in the sort of individuals who can make a real difference, as the likes of Todd Blackadder and Brendan Laney did at Edinburgh.
It is far from a coincidence that it was during their time there that the club made what remains the only appearance by a Scottish team in the Heineken Cup quarter-finals.
There has been some encouragement for those involved in the professional teams not only in the efforts made to keep Gray in Scotland, but in the assurances Glasgow have received that the money he was offered can now be spent on recruitment.
It will take at least one major signing, however, to change the way that Scottish teams are seen by the wider rugby world, and individuals with the vision and charisma of Blackadder, now head coach of world rugby’s most successful provincial operation at the Canterbury Crusaders, are few and far between.
“With every import you bring in you’ve got to bring the right person in that you understand what he’s there for, how he’s going to develop and who he’s going to work with,” said Robinson.
Any such individual will need to see some evidence that there is some point in taking the risk of joining one of the lesser lights in the European game because they can see the prospect of being involved in something special. That is what Blackadder believed to be the case when he arrived a decade ago.
The forthcoming Heineken Cup competition offers Scotland’s teams a chance to increase their attractiveness to potential targets, then, which means Gray can, as the most recognisable figure in the current squad, yet repay the investment made in him down the years by helping Glasgow make a major breakthrough this season.
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