Eddie Pollock sets his sights higher than fight for survival

IT IS several years since Eddie Pollock coached in the top flight of Scottish club rugby, and he has not brought a great rash of players to Bridgehaugh over the summer to bolster his Premier Two champions, but he retains that trademark confident air.

''What will be your key to survival in Premier One?'' I asked, and immediately regretted it. I should have known better with Pollock.

"Survival? Survival! We're not coming up just to survive," said the Stirling County coach.

"We want to be in the top six at the finish at least, having shown we can compete with every side in the league. That has to be our goal and that's certainly the message I'm spelling out to the players.

"You have to aim high because if you look just to survive then that's the best you can expect, which is not going to be far away from landing in relegation. We don't even want to be involved in the relegation battles come the winter, which means staying clear of that bottom four.

"But I have a lot of confidence in the players and the squad we have at Stirling. We are littered with quality boys who have come through Scotland age-group sides and they have earned their shot at Premier One."

Pollock has always had a hard-edged, ambitious approach. His own playing career started out at Jordanhill College where John Rutherford and Andrew Ker were among his team-mates, and after 13 years in the County front row he has pitched up in places as varied as Grangemouth, the USA and Haddington to develop his coaching, in addition to other stints at Bridgehaugh.

He knows the Scottish game pretty well, which is why Stirling brought him back to help turn the club around, having watched his efforts to lift Haddington in a largely successful three-year spell. He is also an astute judge of what makes a player and a team, and had the cards fallen differently when he was Scotland Under-21 coach nearly a decade ago he might have been in the pro game by now.

Instead, he is looking at bringing back the glory days of the mid-Nineties to his first club, and his wide smile evokes the image of a pig in muck.

A young side will need a strong figure at the helm to cope with the demands of Premier One, and Pollock is pleased to have former pro prop Millan Browne and Graham Young alongside. But insisting that his talk of being more than just survivors is not bluff, Pollock pointed to why he believes that County will not suffer the same bounce of previous sides, notably Stewart's Melville, whose stay among the big boys last term proved a short and painful one.

He said: "We won Premier Two pretty well last season whereas when Stew/Mel came up they lost eight games in the process and so were not much better than other teams in the division.They then lost half their team as their main sponsor went bust, and so it was not really a surprise to me that they struggled in Premier One.

"Most of our squad have also experienced Premier One before and so know what faces them, and how tough it is to compete week in week out. But they showed in the way they won the league last season and beating Hawks and Selkirk in the cup that they are capable of living with these teams.

"The big thing for us, like most teams, will be how we keep clear of injuries and how often we can field our best side. But I'm also hopeful that we'll get a few boys from the pro game through the draft, which will help too."

He added: "My job at Stirling is to develop a team that in the good seasons will be challenging for the title and in the poorer ones will be mid-table. That will take time, but we're ready to take the next step.

"This is where we want to be, playing in the top league in the Scottish game, and I believe this is where Stirling County should be because the club has worked very hard to get up here and is a good, strong club with a lot of talent. But it's up to us to prove that we deserve to stay there."

COACHES: Eddie Pollock, Millan Browne, Graham Young.

INS: Tyler Edwards (Gold Coast Breakers), Duncan Morrison (England), Michael Doneghan (Stewart's Melville).

OUTS: Glen Bryce (Heriot's).

PRO DRAFT: James King, David Denton (both Edinburgh), Colin Shaw, Alastair Kellock (both Glasgow), Tim Visser (Edinburgh), John Barclay, Federico Aramburu (both Glasgow).

LAST SEASON: Premier Two champions and cup quarter-finalists.