No shortage of potential at Falkirk

Sports Journalist

Tuesday 23 October 2012

Mark McKenzie never settled for second best throughout his playing career at Stirling County, so it should not come as any surprise that the Falkirk coach expects the same lofty standards from his new side.

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Neil Drysdale

Given the Sunnyside club's recent run of four consecutive wins in the RBS Championship – it has steered them to second place in the table, behind Cartha Queen's Park – one might anticipate that McKenzie, the former Scotland A stand-off, would be in ebullient mood. Instead, he chose to focus on the factors where his personnel need to improve to have credible title ambitions.

"We haven't been playing particularly well, and we know there is still a long way to go. The good thing is that we have lots of youngsters in the squad and they are eking out wins, such as the [12-10] one against Dunfermline and the [19-5] success against Dalziel," said McKenzie, who has recently been appointed director of rugby at St Aloysius College in Glasgow. "It was always going to be a bit of a mish-mash, considering the mass clear-out of players at the end of last season and, when I first came into the job, we only had about eight lads left from the previous campaign."To some extent, the youngsters have had to grow up quickly, and I have been impressed with the rise of such as Aubrey McCube, Stewart McCulloch, our captain, Kris Burney, Laurence Miller and Logan Bonnar. These guys don't have much experience of championship rugby – in a few cases, they are still in their teens –but they are learning in a tough league and there is no shortage of potential at this club."That latter fact is beyond dispute after digesting the statistics served up by Alex McQuade, the Falkirk president, one of the coiled springs of energy dedicated to transforming the old-fashioned mindset within the community game.A recent audit of their youth section highlighted that more than 200 youngsters are strutting their stuff with a rugby ball in hand, encouraged by no fewer than 14 qualified coaches. The thorniest issue for Falkirk's officials lies in how to find pitches to accommodate everybody seeking matches, come rain or shine, throughout their catchment area. It is a problem which many other Scottish organisations would love to have."In the long term, we realise it isn't sustainable to keep relying on importing foreigners, so the message is clear: if we want to have any long-term success, we have to unearth and bring through our own players and that is why so much effort has gone into building a youth structure, which has been bolstered by a string of hard-working volunteers," said McQuade. "When I first came to Falkirk, they were in Division 5 [of the old National League structure] and I remember going to places like Crieff – which was a smashing club, by the way – and thinking: 'Shouldn't we be setting our sights a bit higher?'"Falkirk, after all, is a pretty big town with a lot of sporting heritage. Perhaps we should be aspiring to be like Ayr in the future and be aiming for the top flight. We have the numbers here, we have a full-time DO [Andy Douglas], and Sunnyside is packed with rugby-daft youngsters every weekend. So we just have to get to the next stage."McKenzie echoed those sentiments and was in agreement that paying for flights, and finding employment, for Southern Hemisphere recruits remains, at best, a stop-gap measure. The question now, as Falkirk prepare to travel to Burnbrae to tackle West of Scotland on Saturday, is whether they can harness their precocious potential and convert even one in 10 of their mini-stars into the next generation of grassroots heroes.PERFORMANCE OF THE WEEKSome wondered how Ayr might react to losing their unbeaten Premiership record to Currie. They responded with an almighty thumping of Aberdeen GSFP, to maintain their title pursuit.TALKING POINTFew would have predicted that Aberdeen Grammar and Dundee HSFP, who meet this weekend, would be languishing at the bottom of the league. But they are and the losers at Rubislaw could find themselves hopelessly adrift.

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No shortage of potential at Falkirk

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