To get to play for Scotland at the highest level there used to be a fairly defined way of doing so, what is now called the pathway. Back then, and I’m talking way back in the amateur era, such a pathway was just for men and not women – the distaff side just didn’t play the game in those unequal days.
You played at your school, and preferably a fee-paying independent school with a big rugby background, who then pointed you in the direction of the club for which the schools were ‘feeders’ – the clue was in the FPs suffix. Or you turned up at your local club – it helped to have a male relative already in that club - and were talent-spotted.
If your local club happened to be a well-known one, you stayed there and learned the game. If it was just a community club, then you moved, or were moved, to a bigger club – no pro clubs back then, well not officially - before playing at District level and then a trial for the national team. Simples.
Take the 1984 Grand Slam winning squad, for example. All the players in that memorable season were products of the pathway as it then was. No players qualified through a grandparent, none an import qualifying on residency grounds, and if I remember rightly, the only player born abroad was John Beattie, and that was because his father was managing a rubber plantation in North Borneo at the time.
That was the elite pathway. The rest of us just played for our local clubs and if we were lucky, we managed a good few seasons before age and wear and tear took their inevitable toll.
Then the sport went ‘open’ – make that professional - 40 years ago next year, and nothing has ever been the same. Scotland lagged behind in the professional approach, but come on, we have had 39 years to get it right and we still have not completely done so.
There have been some very welcome developments such as women now playing the game, and the growth of mini and midi-levels means players are being found and coached at a younger and more impressionable age. Despite recruitment problems, most clubs have survived and some have done so by mergers. I suspect there will be more of those.
So why all the problems with community clubs in particular? And why are clubs struggling to recruit and retain young male players?
When I recently asked for some suggestions as to what was wrong with Scottish Rugby at all levels, I got several very interesting replies. One club coach told me he could not guarantee to have the same squad two weeks running, and suggested that was due to players having different lifestyles from bygone days. True, obviously.
Another agreed with me that Covid-19’s impact was worse than has been admitted. “The boys just got out of the habit,” he said. One former SRU council member told me the problem was that what he called “proper structures” between clubs and the professional level had never been put in place.
He said: “The Super Six failure proved that to be the case. And the fact that no obvious replacement for the Super Six was ready to go just sums it up.”
The best reply nailed it for me. I’ll retain his identity to myself but I know his associations and he’s a respected individual. He’s a former club committee member of 17 years, who assisted with minis and had two sons go through school and onwards with their rugby in relatively recent years.
Both those sons went on to play at high level, but only after one of them was assessed by SRU coaches at 15 and decreed not to be good enough for the elite pathway.
“Fortunately, he didn’t give up,” wrote this perspicacious individual, “and went on to be in a team which won the Brewin Dolphin Cup and to play club rugby, which I suspect many from that assessment weekend did not.”
He added: “Local clubs should have been involved throughout the process, which should be over a longer period, and at the end of which, each boy should have a club to go to and know that they were valued by that club and they have a future in rugby, regardless of any assessment by Scottish Rugby. The current system is too profligate with our limited player resources and, while it may save Scottish Rugby in the short term, it does nothing for the game in Scotland over the long term.”
My correspondent added tellingly: “I believe the major structural barrier is the disconnect between clubs and the ‘professional game’, which is the root of many of the current problems in Scottish rugby. This split is an artificial and synthetic construct, causing much damage to the long-term well-being of the game in Scotland and I am not aware of any country with a similar split.”
I think that analysis is correct and we need to get better cooperation at all levels. We have too small a player base to waste any player.
