Appetite for change sweeps through Murrayfield as clubs accept radical restructure

SCOTTISH rugby came together strongly and vociferously at Murrayfield on Saturday in an AGM that pulled no punches, fought out a new agreement to change radically the league structure and delivered a sharp bang on the nose to the SRU over its continuing and appalling neglect of the game's history.

It was one of the most productive AGMs for many years. The man many had been waiting to come in, Sir Moir Lockhead, played no part. The ambitious businessman ended the meeting as the new executive board chairman, and his first public comments on these pages today will lift hearts, but all that had happened before SRU President Ian McLauchlan, finally, called the meeting to an end, was the work of the near-250 club representatives across the country.

As expected, the first motion of the day was to prove the most hotly debated and there were numerous pleas to the membership on the merits of change before a sizeable majority opted to back the plan presented by the SRU's own working party for a new structure that would cut the number of clubs playing nationally from 72 to 20 over the next two years. Everyone, it appeared, supported change. The issue was purely a matter of how far the change would go. Would the clubs go with the working party, a group of mostly club representatives who had spent the past year meeting with clubs across the country and formulating a plan to cut national rugby from six divisions to two, and from a 12-team structure to ten-team one, by 2012-13, or back an amendment to cut it only to four and leave most at 12 teams?

There was some irony in the fact that at the heart of the need for change lay concerns among clubs at the continuing loss or unavailability of players to play each week, and particularly in away games. Earlier in the AGM, we had heard of how the numbers of people playing rugby had risen for a fifth consecutive year, to now stand at more than 14,000 adults and 28,000 youth players.

There is no dispute in the figures, but an acknowledgement that the audit only started in 2005 and so remains some way from the figures of a decade or so ago. There is a problem, with travel costs too, and that is what brought John Davidson, the chairman of the working party, to the point of speaking for the motion on Saturday. He laid out the issues clubs had raised with the SRU, through representatives like himself, the Premier Two rep on the Scottish Rugby Council, with one club (Hawick YM) having had to raise more than 14,000 last season purely to cover their travel expenses. Others were on the verge of going out of business. He outlined the phased move over two years, starting with scrapping National Leagues Two and Three for next season and putting those clubs into a new regional set-up of leagues in the east, west, Caledonia, north and midlands.Next year, the plan will cut Premier Three and National One out of the national set-up and slim the leagues to ten teams, leaving Premier League, National League, Championship East and West (or North and South depending on the geography of clubs involved) above the regional system.

Gerry Saunders, of Perthshire RFC, was first to speak for the amendment, which advocated stopping after stage one, but while it was essentially a straight argument between doing what most clubs in Premier Two, Three and National One appeared to want, or back the working party, he tried to turn it into a 'clubs v union' debate, appealing for delegates to vote for "real club people" rather than "an SRU group with an agenda". That argument may have hindered the amendment rather than helped it, and the vote was clearly in favour of the more radical change. The second motion, for a restructure of the cup, shield and bowl competitions to further shorten the season, went through swiftly, which means that clubs in each of the four traditional districts will now create their own qualifying competition, the winners of which will contest next year's semi-finals.

The motion to re-create a museum (reported in full on these pages) provided a perfect show of the clubs' strength. With Sir Moir Lockhead taking over as chairman, confirmation that Scotland will have a full-time sevens squad next season and popular former Scotland scrum-half Alan Lawson joining the union as vice-president, there was a palpable positivity after Saturday's AGM. After the difficulties rugby has faced over the past year, Scottish clubs have played their part in creating a fresh sense of optimism.