Tom English: ‘Finally, there is a sign of a beating heart, a reason to believe that better days lie ahead’

The scene from France, where Edinburgh beat the exotic and monied Racing Metro with the last kick of an absorbing match, could not have been more impressive. Here was a team that has grown in stature in the few months that Michael Bradley, their Irish coach, has had hold of them; who have gone from being an always talented but too often soft-touch side, to something more substantial, more resilient.

The way in which they worked their field position to where Phil Godman could drop the winning goal was positively Munsteresque. For all the patience, accuracy and cool-headed focus they displayed in those critical minutes, it could have been the hard-nosed Irish pack doing the hard yards and Ronan O’Gara himself landing the glory kick. That’s as big a compliment as you can pay to Edinburgh. They are beginning to look like a team that never knows when they’re beaten.

It is obvious that Scottish rugby needs the professional clubs to be successful – they need it like they need their next breath – but Scottish sport needs it, too. The nation needs more positivity on its sporting landscape, a place forever dominated by largely failing football teams and the misery that comes with a game in crisis. Page after page of coverage of one sport is understandable, given Scotland’s love of football, but it’s not healthy. For close to a decade and a half Scotland has had one team sport to focus on. Given rugby’s inexorable decline in the professional age – save for the odd season of false dawns – it hasn’t come close to exciting the nation the way it did when those old rogues John Jeffrey and Finlay Calder were in their pomp. It is far too early to say that those days are returning but, finally, there is a sign of a beating heart, a reason to believe that better days lie ahead.

Next Sunday, Edinburgh must finish what they started when London Irish visit Murrayfield for the final game of the pool stage. Edinburgh must win. They must. To win would be to guarantee qualification for the knockout stages for only the second time in their history. Not only that, a win would maintain the fabulous momentum they have created. It would give them a chance of a home draw in the quarter-finals and more buzz (and revenue) around Murrayfield. The pressure is on them, big-time. But they seem to be wearing pressure a lot more lightly these days. They look like a side that can carry the burden.

Momentum is everything. My one sporting wish for 2012 was that a Scottish team – preferably both Scottish teams – found a way of making the knockout stages of the Heineken Cup. If you ask me what my wish for 2013, 2014 and beyond is then it’s the same thing. Having seen at first-hand the extraordinary growth of rugby in Ireland on the back of Heineken Cup success, the thought of something similar happening in Scotland is a vision of a future that is intoxicating. The way in which legends have been made in Munster and Leinster – and Ulster are coming on strong, too – has been awe-inspiring in so many ways. More kids play the game, more people turn up to watch, more money comes through the gate and the success becomes almost self-perpetuating.

It took many years to achieve and it didn’t just happen on the field either. There are two battles to be won here. One is for the players and the other is for the people above them, the SRU and how they build on what is being achieved. In 2004, Edinburgh made the knockouts of the Heineken, winning five out of six games in their pool, a stunning victory over Toulouse among them. They bombed in the quarters, against Toulouse again, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that something positive had finally happened for a Scottish team in Europe and there was no plan to capitalise on it. The SRU saw the opportunity float in and then allowed it to float out of their window. The following season Edinburgh won two of their six games and finished bottom of their pool. The season after, they won one out of six and were bottom again. Same story the following year. Last once more. The SRU were all about in-fighting and slash and burn, about alienating their core support and, through their slapstick, they allowed their Celtic cousins to speed away from them and disappear over the horizon. While the Irish and the Welsh added stellar foreign names to help bring on their promising youth, the SRU sat on their hands and did nothing bar plead poverty. The very players that should have been at the heart of the union’s strategy to build the game in the professional age were allowed to leave, their marketability spread across the clubs of England and France instead of where it was needed most – at home.

The SRU practically encouraged the exodus, a policy that had its roots in the self-defeating focus on the Test side. The rationale in recent years has been that Scotland’s playing elite were too expensive to keep and that, in any event, their departure to bigger clubs with greater resources would make them better players when they returned to play for the national team. It was a view of the world that was bonkers. No sustainable success will ever come unless Edinburgh and Glasgow drive it. The thinking of the SRU has been disastrously misguided for the longest time.

There is a change on the pitch and, mercifully, a change off it. When Mark Dodson, the man who only recently replaced Gordon McKie as chief executive at Murrayfield, spoke to us in Auckland in the wake of Scotland’s cataclysmic exit from the World Cup it was easy to be cynical about his claims that the philosophy had changed at Murrayfield and that money would be found to support Edinburgh and Glasgow the way they should have been supported for all these years.

Dodson has made a promising start. Things are looking up. But it’s not just the players who must seize the day on Sunday, it’s the decision-makers at Murrayfield, too.