Edinburgh and Glasgow: Trial by ire

Published on Saturday 26 December 2009 20:14

WITH SO MANY OF Scotland's players now plying their trade at Edinburgh and Glasgow, the forthcoming double-header between the sides won't just have a major impact on the Magners League table, it will also clarify the pecking order ahead of the Six Nations, which begins for Scotland with a home match against France on Sunday, 7 February.

• Evans above: Edinburgh's John Houston is relishing his battle with Glasgowflyer Thom, a clash of styles and physique. Photograph: Craig Watson/SNS

With the exception of blindside flanker and the back three, where most or all of the main candidates play outwith Scotland, most of the players vying for inclusion in national coach Andy Robinson's 22-man squad will be on show. Some of the individual confrontations this will throw up are mouth-watering, and have traditionally resulted in matches between the two which are euphemistically referred to as "feisty" or "committed".

We asked four Scottish legends – Jim Telfer, Iain Paxton, Alan Tait and Craig Chalmers – to run the rule over key units and give us a sense of who they believe will come out on top.

JIM TELFER on the front five

With Jim Hamilton still injured, there are no great confrontations in the second row, but the same doesn't go for the front row. With Euan Murray and Alasdair Dickinson out of the equation, and Scott Lawson unlikely to get a look-in despite his promising form for Gloucester against Glasgow, all of Scotland's Six Nations front row will come from these two matches.

Although I don't think it will happen, I'd go for the Glasgow front row as a complete unit because I think it's stronger, harder-edged and more mobile. That includes hooker, where Dougie Hall (right) has bulked up a lot and is now comparable to Ross Ford, who is a bigger man but doesn't ask as much of himself. It would be unfair to lay Scotland's line-out problems at Ross's door, especially as his throwing-in has got a lot better, but with Glasgow team-mates Ally Kellock and Johnnie Beattie the two main jumpers, it makes sense to consider Dougie.

The props are even more interesting. Allan Jacobsen has been a good servant, but he has not been starting every game for Edinburgh, while Kyle Traynor struggled against Bath. Jon Welsh, by contrast, was immense against Gloucester's new English tighthead Paul Doran-Jones and it was only when he went off and Kevin Tkachuk came on that things started going wrong for the Warriors. Jon only recently turned 23 but he is just hard, mobile and a great prospect.

The same goes for Moray Low, who is just 25 but is also mobile, a good enough scrummager and not only a better rugby player than Geoff Cross, but a better rugby player than Euan Murray. Now that he's stopped getting sin-binned so often, he's our No.1 tighthead.

IAIN PAXTON on the back row

If the back-to-back Glasgow-Edinburgh games are in effect a Scotland trial, the main back row focus for me will be at No.8 where the current Scotland first-choice Johnnie Beattie faces two players – Edinburgh's Dave Callam and Johnnie's team-mate Richie Vernon, who'll probably play on the blindside – who have the ability to put him under real pressure.

Richie's a couple of years younger than Johnnie, and is a good medium-term option whose time will come. But in the short term Andy (Robinson] knows that Johnnie reacts well to being pushed so, in the absence of Simon Taylor and Ally Hogg, he will want to build up some competition with Dave, who's only 26 but made his debut three years ago and has the experience to step up.

All three are similar players in that they are genuine athletes capable of playing the mobile open game Andy wants. They are all good in the line-out, solid from the base of the scrum, read the game well and carry the ball tidily, so Andy will pick on form and with an eye on the opponents. That will give Dave, who's only just back from injury, a huge incentive while also ensuring that Johnnie remains at the top of his game.

Also potentially fascinating is another three-way collision, this time at openside, where the incumbent, Johnny Barclay, could face either Edinburgh's Alan MacDonald, who has really impressed me, or the man Alan understudied in Robbo's first year at Edinburgh, Ross Rennie, who's coming back from injury but is a real favourite of Andy's. All three are almost exactly the same age and, unlike the No.8s, provide a real range of skills in an area that Andy knows better than any other.

ALAN TAIT on the centres

I worked with these guys as recently as the tour to Argentina so I like to think that I know their games pretty well. For me, at outside centre I'm a huge fan of Ben Cairns, who's a good all-round 13. He reads the game well, is a solid defender and a dangerous attacker. People get mesmerised by little flashes of Max Evans' fast feet, but he's injury-prone, has struggled defensively at the very top level and is hard to build a team structure around. There's no time or space in international rugby, and it's consistency that wins Test matches, which is where I think Max falls down. I'd look at him very much as a sub who can come on as an impact player.

The situation's pretty similar at 12, where Nick De Luca has got everything, physique, good feet and vision, but is let down by being too much of an individual. He's gradually getting better and will one day be a fantastic player, but he is still prone to moments of madness. Like Max, what he lacks as a team player he makes up for in his ability to take on a man, and as he can play inside or outside centre I'd be looking at him as an impact sub.

I'd play G-Dog (Graeme Morrison] at 12. He gets over the gain-line, has great hands and is very steady, although he does throw in the odd lapse of defensive concentration that means he could struggle if Andy Robinson wants a big-tackler like Alex Grove at 12.

CRAIG CHALMERS on the halfbacks

The key decision faced by Andy Robinson is how he wants to play in the Six Nations, and no-one has more impact upon the way a team plays than its scrum-half and stand-off, especially if the emphasis is on playing "heads-up" rugby. Of all the positions under the microscope when Glasgow meet Edinburgh, scrum-half and stand-off are also the most obvious head-to-heads: he either chooses Chris Cusiter to captain the side or he goes for Mike Blair; he either keeps faith with Phil Godman or he reverts to Dan Parks.

The contest between the two sets of halfbacks is all the more intriguing because of the differences in the way the four men play the game, and nowhere more so than at stand-off. Ideally you want a ten with a big boot who can control the game territorially if needed, and unleash the back division outside him if that's what's required. Unfortunately we have in Dan a player whose game management is excellent but who doesn't feel as comfortable on the gain-line as Andy's less structured gameplan requires, while Phil is happy to play off the cuff but hasn't yet really proved he can control tight games if needs must.

I would stand by Phil, as I'm sure Andy will, mainly because he has little choice if he wants to play a high-tempo game. Dan's still got something to offer, but not the way Andy's teams are set up to play.

At scrum-half there's so little between Chris and Mike, although neither is at the top of his game just now. I'd stick with Chris because he's playing with real confidence just now; Mike is a real competitor but he has been struggling to recapture his best form.

TALES OF TWO CITIES: DERBIES OF DAYS GONE BY

GLASGOW

John Beattie

I remember having to change strips on the bus once on the M8 because we were late for the game and then running off the bus and on to the pitch. I actually moved to Heriot's so after starting with Glasgow I then played with Edinburgh and lost with both teams. After making the move I played for Edinburgh and had to endure 80 minutes of abuse from my friends in the west.

Ian McLaughlan

I bumped into Bill McLaren before one inter-city derby – I think they were televising it – and he told me he wanted to see tries. I got two that day and scored the first within a few minutes. We had half the Scotland pack at the time, with myself, Sandy Carmichael, Al McHarg and the two Gossman brothers in the backs. It was a decent team.

Shade Munro

Edinburgh was and still is the team that you always wanted to beat. After one match at Hughenden we told the barman to close the free bar so that the Edinburgh players would leave. Once they were on the bus going east we opened it up again and the party carried on. Come to think of it I'm not sure what that says about us!

EDINBURGH

Kenny Milne

In one Glasgow game we had a front row of myself, my brother Iain and David Sole. We absolutely destroyed them in the scrum and there was a picture of it happening that hung in Ian Barnes' Stockbridge bar for years afterwards. It went missing and the story went around that some Glasgow prop had been shamed into taking it down.

Finlay Calder

In the old days there were as many bufties as there were players on the team bus and we had to stop at a pub just outside Hughenden to drop them all off. As the bufties were trooping out of the door Peter Stevens, the Heriot's winger and no mean player, shouted out: "By the way we'll be the ones in the blue jerseys." The whole bus erupted with laughter and I'm not sure if Peter ever played for Edinburgh again.

Scott Hastings

I remember when Ian Barnes was Edinburgh coach and he always made a rousing pre-match speech in the dressing room to gee the boys up. Well, I made a pact with Sean Lineen beforehand to count the number of "fookings" that Barney used in his call to arms and we both burst out laughing when the count got up to 28 after just a couple of minutes.