As the last of Scotland's World Cup campaigners left Auckland yesterday, it felt as if the time had come for a new way of surveying the landscape.
Yes, inclement weather had been a significant factor in the exit, but Scotland’s failure to score tries in three of their four pool matches was a statistic that spoke to a joyless campaign.
It was a shame that the first meeting of Mark Dodson, the Scottish Rugby Union’s chief executive, with the majority of the Scottish rugby media followed a depressing denouement but, for all that the Englishman expressed his concern at the sense of doom and gloom in the room, he acknowledged it was hardly surprising that a cloud hung heavy over proceedings.
The task facing Dodson is to lift the mood and the way he spoke offered encouragement that his priorities will have much more to do with rugby than the previous regime. He comes in at what could be viewed as a good time from his perspective. Scotland may not have fallen to the lowest place they have occupied in the world rankings at 10th, but to find themselves behind Tonga for the first time is sobering. Some Tier 2 nations are closing the gap on the old elite and Scottish rugby looks distinctly vulnerable.
The system in place means Scotland have already qualified for the next World Cup by finishing third in their pool, but significant improvements will have to be made if they are not to be subjected to what could be a very tricky qualifying campaign for 2019 and beyond.
Dodson is understandably keen to hit the ground running by helping Andy Robinson, the head coach, prepare a team that can do well at the Six Nations Championship in the new year.
Both men spoke warmly about the quality of personnel in their respective management teams, as they surely must when speaking publicly.
Yet some very tough decisions will have to be taken as they look towards 2015 and, perhaps more importantly in the context outlined above, the 2019 tournament.
It says a great deal about the Scottish rugby community that, like Dodson and Robinson, not one of the new chairman Moir Lockhead, the performance director Graham Lowe nor the coaches of the two professional teams, Sean Lineen and Michael Bradley, was born in Scotland or is a product of the domestic game.
The expertise these men bring is very welcome, but it is telling that the Scottish game has failed to produce people who can offer the right sort of leadership in the boardroom and on the training ground.
When Ian McLauchlan, one of the greatest leaders Scottish rugby has produced took on the SRU presidency last year, he pledged to bring leading past players with him. Yet other than John Jeffrey, who is a Scottish representative on the International Rugby Board, he has struggled to find individuals who are willing to get involved.
That in itself is significant. The very same mentality that leads to critics of the national team accusing them of being robotic, has resulted in strong personalities, whose individuality and flair could have driven the sport forward, either excluded, turned off or sapped of energy.
Everyone at Murrayfield has had to be on message, whether players or administrators, while attack mode is adopted at any sign of criticism of the organisation.
Dodson spoke about the need to generate stars within the sport but the environment in which people have been working has been doing everything to sap personality.
Stars excite interest in a sport among youngsters, too, which brings us to the other major problem: the dismal failure of the Scottish youth system, in spite of an army of development officers at work across the country.
Robinson knows that he and the other professional coaches in Scotland are having to work with players on skills that they should be able to take for granted, because these skills have not been honed in a sufficiently tough competitive environment.
A first step towards addressing that was voted through by the SRU’s clubs two years ago, when an instruction was made that a competition which involved the leading schools and youth clubs be introduced. The response of the organisation’s officials was to ignore what their owners had told them to do.
It reflects the institutional arrogance that Dodson must address as he takes charge, because a belief exists among some within Murrayfield that they know best and outside voices are irrelevant.
What we have seen in New Zealand over the past few weeks ought to be salutary in that regard, but one downside to having new people in charge is that they often feel they should give people more time to justify their existence rather than taking the sort of action that is now long overdue.
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