The blunders down under

Published on Sunday 2 November 2003 00:00

SCOTTISH rugby’s finest enjoyed a free day on Thursday ahead of yesterday’s seminal Rugby World Cup Pool-B meeting with Fiji, a match which in its significance had swiftly garbed itself during the week in the fundamentals of do-or-die, last-chance saloon, sink-or-swim, or any other cliche suitable to describe the most important 80 minutes in the history of the domestic game.

While most of the 30-man squad took the ferry to the delights of suburban Manly and its golden beaches, ten of the players, plus coach Ian McGeechan, who was coincidentally celebrating his 57th birthday, spent three hours climbing Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The sight of Mike Blair, Graeme Beveridge, Simon Danielli, Stuart Grimes, Andrew Henderson, Nathan Hines, Gavin Kerr, Gordon McIlwham, Simon Taylor and Nikki Walker scaling the city’s most notable landmark was, as no doubt intended, replete with metaphor. Jim Telfer, the retiring director of rugby and the uncrowned King of Semantics, may have surmised that some of the team were about to reach for the sky or were making progress ever upwards. The more cynical among us had it worked out that, in fact, Scotland and their coach were teetering on the edge of a very large drop. A watery grave beckoned. This was a bridge too far.

But at least the accompanying SRU snapper managed to capture a few Scots with smiles on their faces, for in its planning, execution and the circumstances which have accompanied it, this has not been a happy tour.

The first clues that Scotland were woefully ill-equipped to contest RWC 2003 came early on when one senior player, whose judgment I respect implicitly and who is not one to spread negative information, confided that, basically, "the training is a joke".

He also revealed that advice offered by him and other long-serving players to the coaching staff had been ignored, and that some of the selections and game-plans had baffled virtually everyone. The fact that this prompted some players to "go off tour" from virtually the first week seemed a logical consequence of the gulf between players on one side and autocratic and unsympathetic coaches and management on the other.

Within days, in fact, the Scotland campaign began to resemble an inglorious replay of the British Lions’ tour of this same country two years ago, a venture that began gilded in optimism and ended in bitterness, recrimination and an almost total breakdown in relationships between players and management. Despite the lessons implicit in 2001, it is clear that none of those lessons impacted on the Scotland management and, as with the Lions, the so-called dirt-trackers, unable to get playing time in major matches, have been pushed into an "us and them" situation and have become severely disenchanted.

Some of the circumstances which have made this tour such a trial could not have been avoided. The injuries that took Andrew Mower and Gavin Kerr out of the squad were unfortunate, and the blame for the 12-week ban on Martin Leslie for an act that was totally out of character cannot be laid at the door of the management.

But other incidents can, and the Scottish PR has become an unmitigated disaster. This is not the fault of Graham Law, the team’s overworked media liaison officer, who has been caught between the necessity of journalists to have daily access to players and the unwillingness of those men and the head coach to grant such access.

There was no official comment on the Leslie ban and appeal until it was far too late and the International Rugby Board spoke out about Scotland’s management naming their teams by e-mail rather than via press conference. Such decisions were made higher up the ladder than Law, who has been caught between a rock and a hard place.

Some of the incidents, and reaction to those incidents, that have attended Scotland’s travels have been simply embarrassing. The fact that the so-called closed training sessions at Shark Park here in Cronulla were filmed by an Australian spy mission in anticipation of a likely quarter-final between the countries demonstrated a total lack of nous by Scottish management, their laissez-faire attitude to security and amateurish approach to the tournament.

The departure from the team hotel in Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast ahead of a bikers’ convention, accompanied by the headlines of "Fainthearts" in newspapers, could be forgiven, but when the same thing happened in New South Wales, the Scotland team became a laughing stock: "Big girls’ blouses" scoffed the Sydney Morning Herald. Someone should have told Ian McGeechan and his staff that the worst insult you can offer to any Australian is to question the quality of his hospitality.

The unofficial reason for moving out of The Rydges in Cronulla last week to a base in Sydney city centre was that a team meeting had been disrupted by a drunken wedding guest, a logic that is hard to fathom since the alleged incident had occurred on Saturday night when most of the squad, minus the most dedicated, were out on the town in Sydney unwinding after the trauma of a 51-9 defeat by France. Like many other so-called explanations offered by Scotland, this was an insult to the intelligence.

Quite understandably, hotel manager Andrew Cooper was flabbergasted, questioning why they had left it until Thursday to move if they had been so offended, and wondering "why our hotel was good enough for the Namibians, the Australia swimming team and Princess Anne, but not for the players of Scotland?"

A more cogent reason appears to be that some of the players, and their accompanying wives, girlfriends and in some cases children, had found one of New South Wales’ most picturesque coastal resorts far too boring, and wanted to head for the bright lights of the metropolis. There are undoubtedly also some players who find the close presence of the media an irritant, which is somewhat more understandable. As for the state of tedium that appears to be gripping the squad, if Cronulla is the root cause, why stay here in the first place?

The facts are that this resort and Caloundra had been chosen by McGeechan during an extensive scouting mission in the summer, and the coach had praised both centres and the facilities they offered as "some of the best I have seen anywhere". A stronger man would have told his disenchanted charges to like it or lump it, for the disruption caused by constant packing and unpacking and travel can only be guessed at.

The fact that on their free day on Thursday many of the squad would head for Manly, a seaside town almost identical to boring old Cronulla, just beggars belief. But maybe it was as well that some of them eschewed the climb of Sydney Harbour Bridge, for there is no doubt that at least three players I could name, but won’t, would have failed the attraction’s compulsory breathalyser test.

What goes on tour stays on tour is the code that tourists, coaching staff, management and media have obeyed since time immemorial; when you are in the proximity of a party of young players a long way from home, it is often necessary to turn a blind eye to the shenanigans of sportsmen behaving badly.

But when a female companion of this writer was manhandled in a Cronulla night club early on Thursday morning by a drunken Scotland player annoyed that she should be consorting with one of what a team-mate had bitterly described earlier as "a bunch of media bastards", you could say all bets are off.

The worst-case scenario for any sportsman is to be told that his services for a fixture of import are not required, not even on the bench, and many of them seek consolation in time-honoured fashion. No problems with that, but when the same player - and he is not alone - is spending as much time drowning his sorrows in pubs and clubs as he is on the training park, something is amiss.

Either discipline has broken down or it has never been present in the first place, and if players are out getting pissed in midweek during a World Cup, surely the pinnacle of any rugby career, something is rotten at the heart of this touring party.

The disenchantment is surely less to do with results, because the Scots beat the United States and Japan by useful, bonus-point margins and only succumbed to France because of dodgy team selection, a stillborn game-plan and some typical Gallic brilliance. The players here have not performed well, and none has the instinctive flair of the French, but no-one sets out to perform badly, and the Scottish effort cannot be questioned. The fault lies elsewhere and, as we have said so often, in any other sport but Scottish rugby, culpability would be met with the appropriate action.

The SRU could do worse than instigate a full inquiry into what went wrong out here and ensure that, for once, someone is held responsible.

It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that Ian McGeechan’s future role as director of rugby, the man in charge of the future of the game, is untenable.

But don’t hold your breath.

THE SRU replied to the accusations last night with a statement.

Graham Law said: "We would refute utterly the comment attributed to an un-named senior player that ‘training is a joke’. Head coach Ian McGeechan liaises closely with fellow coaches and senior players to shape training sessions.

"We refute completely the implied parallel between Scotland’s current campaign and Jeff’s view of the 2001 British and Irish Lions tour. There is a total unity of purpose within the entire squad and management to win for Scotland.

"We do treat ground security seriously and have worked with local security officials to try to protect the status of our private sessions.

"Our decision to move hotels was made with the intention of providing the best possible test match preparation. On both occasions we have moved we have won the match. Would sections of the media not lambast us for inflexibility if we did not seek to do what we believe to be the best for Scotland’s players?

"We refute utterly your suggestion that our media and PR operation is an ‘unmitigated disaster’. We have not been warned once, twice or at all by the IRB, RWC or any other authorities about our media operation. Our media operation has been praised by experienced broadcasters such as ITV, BBC and Australia’s Channel 7. We have also had glowing feedback from many written journalists with whom we have had the pleasure of working over the last month."