The crassness of the comment was exceeded only by the hypocrisy: “David Sole is the cancer at Scottish rugby,” an SRU committee man said of the man who had led the national side to its two greatest achievements, victory in the first ever Scotland-England Grand Slam decider and coming within a kick of victory in Scotland’s only World Cup semi-final appearance.

Sole still smarts at the memory, his crime - back when committee men lived the life of Riley when on official business – having been to campaign for greater rewards for amateur players who put their bodies on the line, while compromising career prospects in doing so. A couple of years later the first thing the SRU committee did when the sport went open, was to vote to pay themselves.

In a week that sees the national team bidding to return to the top five in the world rankings, that episode came to mind after it was confirmed that Stuart Hogg is heading for pastures new and subsequently revealed that Scotland’s pro players are again looking to set up a union to protect their interests. Previous attempts having been successfully resisted from Murrayfield, they will have to be better organised this time because it may be exactly what the professional game needs in Scotland, if claims made in an online article published this week, that Scottish Rugby’s highest paid executives are financially rewarded twice as well as the best paid players, are correct.

Those figures must, in turn, be seen in the context of an austerity-mired society in which executive pay has become an obscenity. However, if players are minded to challenge how others benefit from their labours, they will have to be rather smarter than the naifs who turned up at this year’s Scottish Rugby AGM believing they were set to witness regime as a result of the Keith Russell affair. That episode, which saw the Scottish Rugby board maintain control of all the findings of the enquiry set up to examine its performance, to the extent that no meaningful details have ever been revealed, was a demonstration of where power lies within a sport in which the SRU is nominally owned by its clubs, but instead has developed corporate machinery which makes the views held within those member clubs irrelevant.

That fits into a wider world in which Ben Ryan, who led Fiji to their gold medal sevens success in Rio, gave an interview to The Guardian in which he expressed his disgust with the sport as a whole, saying: “If rugby were a company, people would be comparing it to Enron. It’s completely dysfunctional.”

In saying so, Ryan pointed to the vast sums made by ‘Tier One’ nations at the expense of the rest, noting that Japan’s players are earning just £13.64 per day this week, ahead of helping fill the coffers at Twickenham. Just days after Scotland coach Gregor Townsend had said he was not sure his team had gone into last weekend’s match as overwhelming favourites. Ryan meanwhile pointed to the ridiculousness of those who criticised a Fiji team that had no chance of preparing properly. His biggest concern, however, was reserved for how the sport is developing as a whole, in terms of how it is played observing that: “You can’t put a number on everything but we know the game is going in the wrong direction. There are still too many stakeholders and too many invested decisions. They need some independent consultants to say: ‘This is what is best for the game.’”

Which brings us back to the Keith Russell affair, at the heart of which was an attempt by Scottish Rugby’s then director of community rugby, to champion the grassroots at a time when the focus is on the professional end. With attendance at pro games growing and the number of amateur teams dropping alarmingly since the sport went open, rugby is increasingly in danger of emulating American Football, which is all about entertainment and provides it superbly, but is far removed from how rugby has always seen itself, revolving around club camaraderie.

Scotland may well beat the Springboks today and earn that top five slot and many will be well rewarded if they do, but after watching son Finn do what he can to bring that about, Keith Russell will return to his new job running BadmintonScotland which he took on declaring his principal ambition to be making badminton Scotland’s number one participation sport, a goal that can benefit society as a whole, rather than simply lining the pockets of either players or greedy executives.