Fretting prop can spot the way out

SCOTLAND’S players will need no reminders of the incentives presented by a successful tour of South Africa next month. With the World Cup looming in the autumn, the two tests against the Springboks, in Durban and Johannesburg, provide the last opportunity to book what may not be a totally-metaphorical plane ticket to Australia.

For the recalled prop Gordon McIlwham, the tour opens the prospect of another, shorter, journey: a one-way trip from France back home to Glasgow.

McIlwham makes no secret of his desire to escape Begles- Bordeaux, preferably before his contract runs out in a year’s time. While team-mate James McLaren, on his second spell in France, has embraced the culture, learned the language - not a trace of Stirling argot in the immaculately-enunciated answerphone message - McIlwham has remained obstinately Glaswegian.

Dialogue between him and his Begles-Bordeaux forwards coach Philippe Gimbert - "He doesn’t have much English, and I don’t have much French" - is conducted in a Paisley-Firminy hybrid, and there have been mutterings about the financial stability of the club. McIlwham and his wife, Kim, have kept a home in Eaglesham, south of Glasgow, and their three-year-old son, Tyler, is approaching schooling age.

"I do get homesick," he reveals. "We have no family out here, and I have spoken to my agent about a move. There have been discussions with home-based teams, and although I have a year still to run here, I am trying to get out before then.

"I think the budgets of the Scottish professional teams may be limiting them, but I would consider a drop in wages if, say, I could get a two-year deal for slightly-less pay than here. I would consider it for sure. It would all depend on whether Begles-Bordeaux would be prepared to release me."

The solution to that has already occurred to the 33-year-old former Clarkston and Hawks forward: "If I do well in South Africa and get selected for the World Cup, I won’t be here anyway, so they might consider letting me go early."

The ball, as they say, is in the McIlwham court.

"I have enjoyed it out here, and I think my game has improved. Gimbert [the former Bordeaux and France prop] has shown me a few new tricks, and there are more good props out here, so the competition is probably a bit better than back home.

"On the financial side, they say it is all sorted out, but one thing I have learned out here is that they say one thing, and often mean something else. It is quite nice and the weather is certainly better, but one thing’s for sure: it’s different from Glasgow!"

McIlwham was arguably the nearest thing to a surprise selection when national coach Ian McGeechan unveiled his South African squad last week, the call coming two years after his previous cap, in March 2001, and 12 months after he had been discarded by the Glasgow professional side.

The ironies of sporting fate, and in particular the perverse conundrums of Scottish rugby, can raise a smile in McIlwham now, though it was far from funny at the time Glasgow chief executive David Jordan announced the player’s departure last May, in an effort "to rejuvenate the side".

This decision came a month after McIlwham’s selection for the tour of North America, and he immediately announced his withdrawal from the party: "There were other priorities, like finding a new job".

He could also muse on the irrationalities of a domestic game that would deem him good enough to play for his country, but unable to match the expectations of his club. The fact that he has been handed the opportunity to take part in the game’s ultimate set-piece, a World Cup, and that the club that rejected him are engaged in talks to re-engage him, can only add to his wonderment.

McIlwham, however, is not a man to engage in introspection: "I have been given another chance, and it is up to me to take it. You never want to say that you have had your time, but I have to admit that I never expected to be selected again. I was still training just as hard here in the hope that someone would notice me, and I have been pleased with my form in France. It is a faster game here, probably because of the harder grounds, and that may do me no harm when it comes to playing in South Africa.

"We have a lock here, Matthys Stolz, who is South African, and he reckons we have a realistic chance, as the Boks are struggling a wee bit."

It may not be that straightforward. South Africa famously lost dismally at Murrayfield on their Tour of Hell last autumn and a little matter of revenge may be a priority for coach Rudi Straeuli and his men.

Nor are there any warm-up games for the Scots, the selected 22 going straight into tests a week apart on June 7 and June 14. Most of the Springboks will come fresh, if that is the word, from the bloody rigours of Super 12.

McIlwham apart, the only vaguely-unexpected selection by McGeechan and his selectors was that of Edinburgh’s Andrew Dall, the former Heriot’s FP flanker thus fulfilling the family expectations that once rested on the shoulders of his older brother, Graham. With a backrow of Simon Taylor, Todd Blackadder and Martin Leslie ahead of him in the Edinburgh pecking order and starts limited last season to four, the Scotland call came as "a wee bit of a surprise" to the 25-year-old graduate of the Scottish Institute of Sport.

As he says: "It has been a bit of a quiet season for me. I feel I have played well in the games I’ve been involved in, but not getting game-time has been the hard thing. Simon, Todd and Martin are a world-class back row, but obviously someone thinks I have got something that someone else doesn’t.

"The fact that I wasn’t able to go back to my club under the first-year professional ruling scuppered me and a lot of the other guys. I have been borderline, too, in that I haven’t been able to play in back-up games because I’ve been sitting on the bench for Edinburgh. But that is no-one’s fault, certainly not the coaches.

"It is not like I have been told I am in the Scotland team, and I haven’t made it yet; it’s just a question of if I get a chance, playing well.

"Hopefully, I’ll be training in front of the coaches and, hopefully, they’ll see what I can do."