Mid-season split planned for top flight

THE Scottish Hydro Electric Premier One league may surface next season in a an entirely new format following a meeting between Scotland's leading clubs and the SRU's new high performance director Graham Lowe on Thursday.

Everyone involved in club rugby understands that greater intensity is required to push standards up, but any formal restructure of the leagues requires agreement at the AGM. To get around this problem in the meantime, Lowe is confident a consensus can be reached among the top flight teams to approve his proposal and press ahead with the alteration for 2010/11.

Taking a leaf from football's Scottish Premier League, he is suggesting a mid-season split. Premier One would retain its 12-team structure with every team playing each other once before Christmas. At that point the league would divide into two. After a break of two to three months, Premier One would resume with the top six clubs playing each other once more to decide the title and the bottom six doing the same to determine which two teams get relegated.

The split would enable Scotland's age group players to play in every league match, a huge bone of contention between the SRU and the clubs at the moment. Clubs rarely see their best young players even before the international season starts in February because they are forever pushing weights or undergoing enforced periods of rest.

The New Zealander Lowe appears to have turned a decade of Murrayfield's policy on its head by insisting that Premier One is part and parcel of the high performance game, as the clubs have been arguing for years, rather than the top strata of what is now known as the "community game". Lowe is understood to have praised the efforts of the Premier One, which boasts heaps of talent and experience in its coaching ranks, suggesting that they should see themselves effectively as 12 academies.

The problem for the clubs is how to fill a three-month gap between January and the end of March. Some cup games could fill a few weekends but that won't keep players fit and interested over the course of 12 weeks. At least a mid-season break would ensure that the clubs avoid the worst of the weather.

The Premier One clubs are also understood to want extended participation in the British and Irish Cup with four Scottish clubs involved compared to the two at present. This increase in clubs would be at the expense of the Gael Force team, but under-utilised professionals could still play in the competition in club colours rather than those of an artificial SRU team.

There are some who predict that the English clubs, who are more interested in their own domestic championship, will pull out of the competition. If this happens, and with Welsh and Scottish clubs still involved, there is hope that the Irish clubs will replace the Irish provinces' professional back-up teams to create a Celtic Cup for clubs.

It makes more sense to have like against like rather than Munster's back-up side stocked with full-time pros playing amateurs in Scottish club colours.