Damp Squib

It's all too easy and fashionable to have a go at Frank Hadden, the Edinburgh coach. But it smacks of ignorance of the game. Of the two pro teams in Scotland, Hadden's is blatantly the weaker on paper or grass - especially as it's laden with homegrown players.

The unpalatable truth is that Scottish rugby teams of any level - club, professional or international - can only be successful these days if they are loaded with imports.

Edinburgh just don't have enough top quality imports to bolster their meagre domestic resources. In the Scottish rugby team that beat Ireland two weeks ago, only aterson, Townsend, Redpath, Smith, Bulloch, White and Taylor really learned their rugby here. That's less than half the players, seven out of 15. And of these, four are playing for our home teams.

If Scotland's domestic football teams are so crammed with imports as to render our Premiership a mixture of unknown Argentinean, French, Italian and Dutch players having a wee break in our country while hoping to glimpse Mel Gibson - with hardly a Scot in sight for post-match interviews - is it any surprise that rugby teams like Glasgow and Edinburgh are struggling a mite at the very highest levels?

That's not to downgrade the important wins of the past, as the then Reivers beat Northampton in an away match, and the then Caledonia Reds beat Leicester, but I put it to you: Can we really produce enough of a pool of top sports people to give us the success we need, when 43 per cent of Scottish schools offer no core PE to S5 and S6 children?

It's joke, a nonsense of such farcical proportions it depresses me.

I must thank Rob Littlefield of Strathclyde University for letting me look at his research into PE in Scottish schools. The solution seems quite simple. If you have a healthy, active and sporty population then you can produce enough youngsters who fall out of the system to make your sports teams capable.

If not, you have to import many players. Frankly, just as Rangers and Celtic do, and just as the Scottish rugby team has had to do.

All French children, by the way, and by way of contrast to our system, do their version of PE all through school to get their leaving certificates.

Perhaps I should remind you: Scottish rugby has never propelled a team into the quarter finals of the European cup. How we mightily need that to happen, despite the fact that with each emerging week it looks less and less likely. And yet we can hope that home draws do not mean the end of the road.

Reality checks are healthy, though. Let's look at the Glasgow rugby team, a team that was playing superbly until it hit the buffers against Montferrand.

I believe it is a side that has the ability to win big games if it would only believe in itself, rather than allow itself to be intimidated. Of the Glasgow rugby team, only Gordon Bulloch and Andy Henderson learned their rugby in Glasgow, a place that makes up a fifth of the Scottish population.

They are joined by Andy Nicol, Jason White, Gareth Flockhart and Jon Petrie in learning the game in this country, which means that of the 15 that start today against Northampton, just six learned their rugby here in Scotland.

This, hand on heart, hints at one of the reasons for Glasgow's relative success - hired hit-men to do a job from Glenn Metcalfe to Tommy Hayes to Gordon Simpson.

Edinburgh have a far higher percentage of home grown players. The starting line-up for the east coast club's disappointing 6-6 draw with Biarritz at Myreside on Friday included only two outsiders, in Sharman from South Africa and Walker from New Zealand.

While the mass of players were home grown, and of a more limited ability if I am to be honest, what the men from the East really miss is a talisman - a leader - a front man of image and presence and power to carry the hopes of the team and its supporters.

Its no surprise, therefore, that Todd Blackadder is coming to the east coast. The former All Black has so much expected of him.

More fireworks and fire eaters off the pitch at a professional rugby team match on Friday night, then. There were glamour names all around in Chris Paterson and Cammie Murray, up against Joe Roff, Phillipe Bernat-Salles, Olivier Roumat and company.

But it was more a spurting Catherine wheel and less fire eating than we had all hoped. What's happening at these big games to make fluidity give way to treacle, as Edinburgh drew a home game they had to win?

What this all means as we look ahead to the arrival of a third team is that the SRU will need to spend to get players. The current crop of domestic players are just not good enough, frankly, to give it a real go when they come up against world-standard teams from other countries laden with hired guns.

Long term, it needs a rethink about sport in our country and the way we give exercise to kids. The trouble is that the SRU have much shorter-term needs.

I never thought I'd write about how we need more imports, but we do if we are to win. Frank Hadden's not the problem, it's the home grown players he's got to pick from I'm afraid.

Copyright 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.