Allan Massie: Edinburgh’s dearth of home brew dilutes ideals

EDINBURGH’S recent signing of a number of players who are not qualified for Scotland, and never will be, has provoked a few expressions of discontent.

With only two pro teams here, won’t the import of two Welsh internationalists, John Yapp and Richie Rees, and a Georgian one, Dimitri Basilaia, restrict opportunities for young Scottish players? Edinburgh already have non-Scottish players in Natani Talei, Sean Cox and Chris Leck who will still be with them next season, while the signing of the South African prop WP Nel was announced in February. The disquiet is understandable – especially if you hold to what seemed until recently to be the received SRU view, namely that the only purpose of our pro teams was to produce players for Scotland. This is certainly something they must do, but the question of how best this is done is debatable. Players develop slowly, if at all, in a team that is suffering heavy defeats and rarely winning.

Edinburgh’s topsy-turvy season sees them in the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup and second bottom in the Rabo Direct 12 league. At full strength they need fear nobody. At less than half-strength with their Scotland players missing, nobody fears them.

Now there are 22 league, and at least six Heineken, matches. Twenty-eight games, with this season, happily, two, and perhaps three, more Heineken ones. Probably no player should start many more than 20 matches a season. Players in the Scotland squad will be missing for the whole of November , February and most of March., though fringe ones may play an occasional club game. Then at any time a club must expect to have half a dozen or more players injured and unavailable for selection. So you need strength in depth.

No club can be sure of getting out of its Heineken pool. This year, for instance, Leicester and Northampton, two of the strongest clubs in England, failed to do so. Edinburgh have done excellently this season. One hopes they will do as well next year, but there is no guarantee: they might find themselves in the same pool as, say, Leinster and Leicester. That would be very tough. So, if they are to continue to make progress and to build up their support, they must do better in the league, and aim, like Glasgow this season, to be challenging for the play-offs and indeed the title. This will only be possible if they are winning matches when deprived of their Scotland players. Nine of the team that started against Toulouse were first choices for Scotland in the Six Nations. Matt Scott also came into the national squad, and Tim Visser will surely be in it next season. One or two others – Grant Gilchrist, Stuart McInally and Tom Brown, for instance – are already on its fringe.

Michael Bradley must therefore expect that he will be without something like two-thirds of his first choice XV for at least a third of league matches – and, given the need for rest and recuperation and the likelihood of injuries – half of them will be missing for other games too. So he has looked beyond Scotland to find tough experienced players who can do more than hold the fort in the absence of his Scottish internationalists.

He has fair reserve strength in the back division, and young backs can be introduced more easily than young forwards who take longer to mature. There were times this season, when, in the absence of their internationalists, Edinburgh fielded a very young front five who were, not surprisingly, overpowered in the set scrum. So Bradley has strengthened his scrum to make it possible to win matches when Scotland calls have weakened it. One should add, too, that it has been clear for some time that their better opponents in the league rarely weaken their team when they bring on replacements, while Edinburgh almost always do.

Finally there is not a single successful professional club in the northern hemisphere that doesn’t bring in foreigners. Edinburgh’s semi-final opponents, Ulster, regularly field five from New Zealand or South Africa. Three of the stars in the Clermont-Auvergne side that crushed Saracens last week-end were Nathan Hines, Jamie Cudmore and Brock James. The future for any pro club that seeks success is multi-national.

Still, for a few weeks, we can indulge in traditional pleasures. The Borders Sevens circuit got underway at Gala last week where Jedforest won the title, only 91 years after their last triumph there. Today we move to Melrose, one of the happiest days in the Scottish calendar, a tournament that is always organised in exemplary fashion. The home club are the holders of the famous Ladies’ Cup, and with the foreign representation perhaps weaker than it has often been, will be hoping for a repeat performance. Bill McLaren said the Melrose Sevens had a special place in his heart, and that goes for most of us. Mind you, every other Borders club would love to beat the home team.