Allan Massie: Road to a full cap now riddled with potholes for our age-grade players

It is hard to believe that last Friday morning I was writing a column on the assumption that the match in Cardiff would be played – a column that had to be quickly amended early in the afternoon. Now the close-down is not only complete but apparently likely to be long-lasting. It is impossible to say when normal service will resume, but it must be quite likely that Scotland’s ambitious summer schedule of internationals in South 
Africa and New Zealand will have to be abandoned.

A wider geographical spread of rugby has helped discover talents such as Magnus Bradbury. Picture: SNS/SRU

As to the hangover from this season, a normal season, as one hopes 2020-21 will be, is already sufficiently congested, without carrying unfinished business over from the present interrupted one. So it would seem to make sense to write this one off, not attempting to finish leagues or cups, unless there is a sudden and unexpected end to the emergency.

Even finding a way to complete the Six Nations would prove difficult, given that Ireland and Italy each have two matches still to play and Scotland, Wales and England one.

Concentration on the epidemic and its consequences for all sport has understandably meant that the Scotland under-20 side’s remarkable victory in Wales has perhaps had less attention than it deserves. For obvious reasons, chief among them small numbers of eligible players and therefore less intense competition among them, our record in age-group international matches has been generally undistinguished. So to go to Wales and score 50 points with seven tries against a good Welsh team that had beaten England the previous week is surely remarkable.

Given that most of the home-based members of this Scotland team have been playing in the new semi-pro SuperSix league, one wonders how much this success owes to the Union’s creation of this semi-pro tier which many of us regarded with a deal of scepticism – scepticism which may have been unjustified.

Of course, even today when with so many more full internationals and 23-strong matchday squads, there are many more still active players who have been capped by Scotland than there used to be, it is still probable that only a few in any age-group squad will establish themselves in the full Scotland team. An international career may last for ten years or more. Stuart Hogg, for instance, was first capped in 2012, and won’t be 28 until mid-summer this year. A good many under-20 age-group full-backs have found the door to a full international cap blocked, and a few more will have the same disappointing experience.

What one does wonder about is the still narrow geographical area from which age-group international players seem to be drawn; indeed the very restricted geographical range of the SuperSix may even accentuate this. Of course, for a very long time there were parts of the country where no rugby was played, where there were no clubs and no rugby-playing schools. Indeed Jim Telfer, the most influential figure in Scottish rugby for more than 40 years as player, captain, coach and administrator, has remarked that if he had been born even 20 or 30 miles from Melrose and gone to a school where football, rather than rugby, was played, he might never have played rugby at all.

Things are different today. There are clubs now in parts of Scotland, even as far north as Shetland, where 60 years ago almost no one had a chance of playing the game. The geographical spread is much wider, even if in traditional rugby areas – the Borders, Edinburgh and Glasgow – clubs field fewer teams that they did half a century ago. Almost all this rugby is what is called recreational – and a good thing too – but the existence of these clubs means that talent has the chance to be discovered and flower. Once spotted, the promising youngster may be offered a chance to develop at a traditional rugby-playing school, as for instance, Magnus Bradbury, reared in Oban, finished his schooling at Merchiston.

Jim Telfer, who celebrated – probably in low-key fashion – his 80th birthday last week, 30 years to the day from his coaching role in Scotland’s Grand Slam defeat of England, has an often forgotten record as a player which is unique and may never be equalled. He played for Scotland against New Zealand (1964), Australia (1966) and South Africa (1969) without once being on the losing side. The Wallabies and the Springboks were beaten; the match with the All Blacks was drawn: 0-0, the last major international in which, to employ the old hack’s line, “the scoreboard was untroubled”.