THE MELROSE MIRACLE-
MAKERS
AT THE END OF every summer, in the first half of the 1990s, sporting affairs in Scotland settled into a familiar pattern for those of us who beavered away on the non-football beat at Scotland on Sunday. There would be previews to write, interviews to conduct and forecasts to make, in advance of the start of the new club rugby season, and it was always a brave person who wagered against Melrose lifting whatever silverware was on offer. This might have been predictable if we had been dealing with one of Scotland’s leading city sides, bolstered by a significant catchment area, but, instead, we were highlighting the plethora of achievements of a club which was based in a small town of only 1,500 people, and yet one which churned out a string of richly-talented internationalists, with an instinctive pride in their Border origins, and a golden team spirit at the Greenyards.
The journey down to the picturesque location was always a treat, as were the regular meetings with the indefatigable club secretary, Stuart Henderson, a little buzz-bomb of energy and passion for everything in the rugby domain, but principally his beloved Melrose and how they would have to battle harder with every passing season. This was a man who remembered the days in the 1970s when they had twice suffered relegation from the top flight, and were accustomed to being trounced by Hawick and Gala whenever these derby rivals met in the Scottish championship or the Border League. Stuart, who passed away tragically young, was one of life’s generous fellows who always fought his team’s corner, and that industrious attitude filtered all the way through the club, from the committee room downstairs into the changing facilities, where a bunch of gifted players prepared to weave magic and forge their own historic trail.
It helped, naturally enough, that this 90s collective was coached by Jim Telfer, with Rob Moffat as his assistant, while the squad contained international stars of the past, present and future, whether it was Keith Robertson, a veteran of the 1984 Grand Slam, or Craig Chalmers, a star of David Sole’s team which famously defeated England six years later, or Bryan Redpath and Carl Hogg, or Doddie Weir, Graham Shiel and Steve Brotherstone. As the winters passed, other distinguished names joined the ranks, including Peter Wright, Craig Joyner, Rowen Shepherd and Derek Stark, and there were afternoons in the little community where 15 or 16 internationalists would be battling for supremacy in front of crowds of over 5,000 supporters, in recognition of the standard of rugby on offer.
Perhaps we should strive to place their exploits in perspective, if only because it is virtually impossible to imagine that any other Scottish club will ever replicate the litany of stunning performances and consistent quality which this generation of players orchestrated over a prolonged period. The seeds of their success were sown when many of the emerging stars participated together in the Crichton Cup – which was a hotbed of youthful gusto and ferocious competition for places – as the prelude to forcing their way into the second XV and subsequently staking their claim for selection in the side which improved with every passing season after finishing third in the national championship during the 1987–88 campaign. Melrose’s first major breakthrough happened when they secured the title in 1990, in what developed into a serried swansong for their veteran captain, Robertson. Then, buoyed by the realisation that they had assembled a squad which boasted oomph in the pack, panache among the backs and a burning determination and rare esprit de corps, Telfer and Moffat steered their charges through their halcyon period. They collected Scottish titles in 1992, 1993 and 1995, in addition to five Border League crowns, as the prelude to dominating the inaugural Tennent’s Premiership in 1996 and advancing into their annus mirabilis in 1997, when they simply gorged on trophies, winning the Premiership, Scottish Cup, Border League and the prestigious Melrose Sevens. And all this in a Dibley-style setting, whose verdant tranquility was only disturbed when Telfer started barking out instructions to the men with union ingrained in their souls.
At the outset of their triumphal march, Melrose were forced to dig deep on a regular basis, such as during their 14–3 success over Jed-Forest in 1990, where they were pushed all the way by their Borders rivals. But gradually, as the players settled into a groove and gelled together, they acquired the knack of closing out opponents, either at home or on their travels, beating GH-K 27–16 to secure the spoils in the 1992 Scottish championship, and following that up with another nerve-shredding 16–7 success over Currie en route to their title objective in 1993. By this stage, it was evident that their initial victories were only part of a wider project, and although Melrose occasionally toiled on heavy pitches in the worst winters, they were unstoppable in pretty much every other regard.
In so many ways, Melrose were trailblazers, whose officials were rather more interested in the trail than the blazers. Their players travelled to South Africa in 1994 and visited Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for almost three decades, and several of their squad members actually sat in his cell and wondered how any human being could have maintained his spirit in such cramped confinement for so many years. A few days later, they took on Villager, the Republic’s oldest club, and beat them 20–19 at Newlands in front of a crowd of over 30,000 people, with the effervescent Gary Parker landing the decisive kick in the dying moments. Even on the cusp of their team being broken up by professionalism, Melrose locked horns with Newcastle Falcons and the visiting Sir John Hall and Rob Andrew were forced to watch the action in bewilderment while the Borders contingent amassed a 26–12 lead against their rivals, before they were eventually pegged back to a still-creditable 26–26 draw. Here, surely, was compelling evidence that Scotland’s clubs could adapt to the pay-for-play era. And then, almost as quickly as success had arrived, the team was cast to the wind, their personnel joining the South district or moving to England, and the opportunity to advance was gone.
Nonetheless, this is not the time for gloomy rumination, but a chance to explore how Melrose made such a fantastic impact on the Scottish game and the wider rugby community. After all, in the intervening period, several of their number have moved into coaching with auspicious consequences, not least Chalmers, who has instilled a hard-nosed professionalism in the Melrose championship-winning class of 2011, Shiel, who is currently in charge of the Scotland Sevens set-up, Redpath, who is the head coach at English Premiership giants Gloucester (where Carl Hogg mentors the forwards), and Moffat, who went on to gain further honours at Edinburgh and is now employed by the SRU. This was not some happy coincidence or a process which occurred by accident. Instead, as Chalmers, the 60-times-capped stand-off told me, it was a masterpiece of detailed planning.
We all grew up together and took part in the Crichton Cup, which was fought out between the local villages in the Borders, and there was just this tremendous sense that Melrose mattered and that rugby was at the heart of the community. You could see it in the sheer number of youngsters who came through the system at the same time; there was myself, Bryan [Redpath], Graham [Shiel], Robbie Brown, whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all played for the club, Carl [Hogg], Scott Aitken, Gary Parker, Steve [Brotherstone], Doddie [Weir] … the list just went on and on. Jim Telfer was in charge and his influence was massive. We were like sponges with him: we soaked up the knowledge and absorbed every bit of information he had to pass on, and the whole culture at the Greenyards was that we had to improve our work ethic, our mental attitude, our physical strength … pretty much everything, if we wanted to win.
Rob Moffat was also important and he and Jim had a ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’ routine – Jim was the ‘Bad Cop’, by the way! – but it wasn’t just about the coaching, because we wouldn’t have won so many titles if we had simply trained together and then all headed off in different directions. Instead, we got to know one another, worked out what made the others tick, talked about rugby and life in general, and it helped create a situation where we could be very critical with ourselves, because we all trusted one another.
It pretty much became our lives. We used to train on Mondays and Tuesdays, and we would be given some free time on Wednesdays, but I ended up doing some kicking practice and others went to the gym, then we were back at training on Thursdays and we met up on Fridays to chat about our opponents the next day, work out how they might play and what we could do to cause them problems, and if that sounds serious, it wasn’t – we would have a laugh and chat and keep in touch with what everybody was doing. After the match, we would go out for a few beers, then we would head down to the club on Sundays and Jim would have us working out and running it out of our systems.
It was a fantastic time in all our lives. There were no distractions, no mobile phones, or Playstations or Xboxes; we just loved playing rugby, and when you start winning games and chasing championship titles, your confidence builds and you believe you can achieve anything. I remember when we beat Jed-Forest to clinch our first title in 1990, it was just a few weeks before Scotland won the Grand Slam, and it was Keith Robertson’s final game. There were thousands of spectators packed into the ground and they were really proud of what we had achieved and it made us more committed to doing it again. In fact, if I’m being totally honest, we should probably have won a couple more titles than we did, though you can’t win every time. But we did come pretty close for a while.
Looking back, 1997 was a pretty emotional time for me, because my dad [Brian] died of a heart attack, while he was watching me play for Melrose against Hawick at Mansfield Park and it was obviously a terrible shock and you don’t get over these things quickly. But he loved rugby, and he was incredibly supportive of me, and that was the final season before we all started drifting away to other clubs. I’ll never forget our last game together – at the end of that championship campaign – against Watsonians where the kick-off had to be delayed by 15 or 20 minutes, because there were so many people trying to get into the stadium. Nowadays, it might sound unlikely, when you think how attendances at Scottish club matches have generally fallen significantly, but we were used to performing in front of 5,000, 6,000, even 8,000- strong crowds. There was still a genuine buzz around the Greenyards, it was a cracking game, which we eventually won by a 20-point margin. But we looked around at the finish and we pretty much knew it was goodbye.
Telfer’s involvement in this process cannot be overstated. He had assumed the coaching responsibilities, at the club where he had made his name, in 1988 and between then and 1994, when he became the SRU’s director of rugby, the transformation in their fortunes was extraordinary. Indeed, one estimate has it that Telfer’s winning record during his six-year stint added up to a tally of 150 victories and three draws in 182 matches, culminating in a success rate of 80 per cent, which is the sort of achievement coveted by any coach in any sport. There were few pleasantries involved in his methodology and woe betide any of the players who imagined that they could go on a bender and escape the dominie’s beady eye. Yet the litany of exploits and their cumulative effect testified to how impressively his charges responded to Telfer. The Melrose and Scotland scrum-half, Bryan Redpath, explained it succinctly:
I will never forget when he used to take us for training on Sunday mornings. There would always be somebody or other throwing up, having taken a bit too much beer the night before. Jim would lay into him about standards and, more than once, he was asked to tone down his language, as people left the church beside the ground [at the Greenyards]. But I knew that his sole motivation was to make me and my teammates better, to keep pushing us to discover new levels, and ultimately to win.
I remember on the day Scotland were leaving for the World Cup [in 2003], I first went along to a birthday party with my son, Cameron. It was for his friend, Harvey Ferguson, the son of Jason and grandson of Sir Alex Ferguson. Alex told me he remembered hearing Jim Telfer had once said to his players: ‘You are not just doing this for your team-mates, you are doing this for your country.’ He said that he really liked that quote and I can remember thinking: ‘You are just like him.’ Two great Scotland coaches.
It was one thing to expect discipline and focus on the international stage. But the most notable feature of the manner in which Melrose responded to their newly-acquired status as Scotland’s leading club in the early 1990s was the lofty standards the players set for themselves, both on and off the pitch. They were a diverse group: Chalmers, chirpily confident, in-your-face, and blessed with a steely streak, was never going to win any popularity contests, and cheerfully admitted as much to his interrogators, but when we used to turn up at the Greenyards in the middle of winter with a last-minute interview request, he would stand patiently, answering all manner of inquiries and responding to the phalanx of photographers’ great lie – ‘Just one more …!’ – with a commendable patience and appreciation of what the media required, whereas his football counterparts at Rangers and Celtic would have flounced away with a show of petulance inside a few minutes. Basically, Chalmers is a winner, a hard taskmaster, with what Scots tend to describe as a ‘guid conceit’ of his abilities, but he never asks his players to do anything which he did not once do himself. He had this to say on the subject:
Whether I am popular or not isn’t going to change my approach. I have made mistakes and I have learned. I have changed as a coach and I will always be learning, because that is part of life.
But I am passionate about the game and want the best for me, my team, my club, and tend to say it as I see it. I am not always right, of course I’m not, but as long as you listen to other people’s opinions, you are entitled to have a view of your own. Growing up in the Borders, I know what it is like to suffer abuse from rival teams, but you just use it to motivate yourself and your team. The diehards, who call me names during a match, often come up to me in the bar afterwards, say hello, and slap me on the back. That’s the way it has always been in the Borders and, whether you are connected to Melrose, Gala, Hawick or the other clubs, I hope that passion for the game never disappears.
There is a soupçon of Derrick Grant and a touch of Telfer in this philosophy. Redpath, for his part, was tough as old boots, somebody whose unshirking approach appealed to his mentors, and a character who always exuded the impression that he would make a good coach in the future. Shiel, modest to a fault, seemed almost embarrassed to be the subject of any press attention, while Doddie Weir revelled in the spotlight and never replied with one word where he could fit an exhilarating chapter into the conversation. As for Gary Parker, the former Heart of Midlothian footballer who later turned out in American football for the Scottish Claymores, those successful seasons in the spotlight at the Greenyards were among the most priceless in his life, as he explained to me.
I can remember having a chat with Stuart Henderson after we had won our third or fourth championship title and he turned to me and remarked: ‘I don’t think you boys realise what you are doing – but you are making history!’ And he was right. It was a magic time, and it wasn’t just at Melrose, but whenever we travelled to Boroughmuir or Dundee HSFP or Stirling County, the crowds were there in their thousands and it was inspiring. They wanted to beat us, of course, but because we had grown up in these atmospheres in the Border League, the hostility usually made us play better.
Jim was a big part of the success, and I was very fortunate because, wherever I went in sport, I found myself working with excellent coaches, whether it was Sandy Jardine in football or Jim Criner in gridiron. I actually believe there are a lot of similarities between Alex Ferguson and Jim Telfer, because both men had the ability to educate their players and it’s no surprise to me that a lot of the guys Alex worked with at Aberdeen, such as Alex McLeish, Eric Black and Mark McGhee, have become good coaches, while it has been the same with the Melrose players who were mentored by Jim Telfer.
Yet my abiding memory from that period is how well we all got on. We could argue, we could fall out, we could fling punches at one another in the heat of the moment, and then it would all blow over, and we would be good mates again in a few seconds. I think any good side has to have that streak of nastiness … no, that’s the wrong word, ruthlessness, and there was also a fierce amount of competition among the boys. We battled for everything: if somebody threw an apple core into the bucket and it missed and fell on the floor, there would be seven of us rushing to pick it up and be the first to get it in the bin. And that had started from the days when we were all kids, so it was just how we were, who we were, and something else that shouldn’t be forgotten is how well Melrose was run in those days, between the slick organisation of the annual Sevens and the way that nothing was left to chance by the committee people and men such as Stuart Henderson. When we nearly beat Newcastle in 1996, I heard Sir John Hall asking Rob Andrew: ‘How can amateurs get the better of professionals?’ But, to be honest, I never thought of Melrose as being in any way an amateurish club: you would never have used that word in connection with Jim Telfer or Rob Moffat and I am convinced that the same remarks apply to Chick [Chalmers], Basil [Redpath] and the rest of the squad in the 1990s.
The regret is that we headed down the wrong [district] route in 1997 and thereafter and I sometimes wonder what might have happened if the Scottish clubs had taken the bull by the horns. Because, it’s all very well for the critics to say that the likes of Melrose didn’t have the money to become a professional club, but we never gave it a chance and that is the model which has worked almost everywhere else in the northern hemisphere. In fact, if we had done down the club route, I personally think we would be talking about live Scottish games being screened on Sky at the moment. But it didn’t happen, we headed in a different direction and I can’t say that it has worked for many in our game.
It remains one of the more perplexing ironies of the Melrose saga that Telfer, the same man who masterminded most of their successes, was also the individual who fought the hardest to prevent them from embracing professionalism when the IRB sanctioned the latter principle in 1995. He argued that he was acting from the best of motives, believing that there simply was not the money for clubs such as Melrose, Boroughmuir, Stirling County and Glasgow Hawks to contemplate searching for potential sponsors and philanthropic backers to fund the pay-for-play era. And yet, the consequence of his alternative strategy – the creation of a centrally-controlled district policy, which has thus far cost the SRU more than £100m, and which nearly bankrupted the governing body a decade ago – has patently disillusioned the majority of Scottish rugby supporters, and pulled the rug from under the feet of the clubs, who were never properly consulted during the union’s rush to hand out contracts to scores of players in the late 1990s.
Certainly, as Parker observed, it was hardly as if the grass roots game at the height of Melrose’s heroics was in poor health. If anything, it was flourishing in the South more than at any time since the boom of the 1950s, and it was difficult to believe that a Borders club select could have fared any worse than the South ensemble who were thrashed to within an inch of their lives by the All Blacks in 1993. Parker continued:
When we came up against Watsonians in 1997, and secured a 37–17 victory in a really tough match, we had seven or eight Scotland internationalists and they had guys like Jamie Mayer, Jason White, Derrick Lee and Tom Smith, so it was scarcely as if the fans were being served up second-rate rugby. The crowds were still trying to get into the Greenyards five and ten minutes after the scheduled kick-off and that told you a lot about the demand and the atmosphere was fantastic. That is what I remember about my time at Melrose; a load of brilliant matches, where we were pushed all the way, but we had this genuine belief that, whatever the scoreline, we would find somebody who would turn things round for us. It didn’t always work in our favour, but it was a terrific adventure and the depth of talent around the club at that stage was remarkable.
In the end, whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, Doddie Weir moved to Newcastle Falcons, Redpath agreed terms with Sale Sharks and Chalmers shone with Harlequins, Worcester and Pertemps Bees, while the majority of the others from their town with aspirations to playing professional rugby hitched their stars to the Scottish district wagon train, which was soon careering towards a sporting Grand Canyon. Yet, while the ensuing years were painful for some people, there was no faulting the decisions of men such as Weir, who told me they had livelihoods and careers to think about.
Obviously, it was a wrench to leave Melrose, because the club had been part of my life for so long and we were such a close-knit bunch of lads. My father and brother actually played for Gala, but I used to go horse-riding with a boy called Sandy Fairbairn, who invited me along to a youth training night at the Greenyards and the rest, as they say, is history. When professionalism first arrived, I have the feeling Scotland’s clubs initially believed they could make the transition and hang on to us, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, we had to look wherever we could to find a new challenge.
And personally, going to Newcastle was great experience. One of the things which always struck you about playing for Melrose was how there were internationalists scattered throughout the team, but making the switch to Kingston Park put that in perspective. When I was down there, we had the likes of George Graham and Pat Lam, Dean Ryan and Peter Walton in our pack and when you looked at the talent in the backs … well, it was different class. There was Gary Armstrong at No 9, Rob Andrew at stand-off, and some youngster called Jonny Wilkinson – I don’t know what happened to him! – hot on his heels, whilst you had men of the calibre of Alan Tait, Tim Stimpson, Va’aiga Tuigamala and Tony Underwood waiting to do their stuff out wide. It was fantastic and the atmosphere around the Falcons was incredible at the time. We won the championship, the Tetley Bitter Cup, and the crowds flocked along in their thousands. So it was definitely an experience which I wouldn’t have missed for the world.
None of which means I wasn’t sad about leaving Melrose, given how much I owed to Jim [Telfer] and Rob [Moffat] and the buzz we got from going on the trophy-winning run in the nineties. And, even today, regardless of how much rugby has changed, I still get a thrill whenever I go along to the Melrose Sevens and meet up with the old gang. None of us has really changed, we can still exchange banter, and show our kids the photographs from the days when we used to be slim young athletes! There were friendships formed at that time which will never be broken and that was one of the most positive things about the old days: you knew everybody at the club and you were all in the same boat as them, doing it for the sheer love of the sport, and nothing else. But rugby has moved on.
Stuart Henderson, with typical candour, remarked to me, shortly before his death in 2004, that he was ‘immensely saddened’ by what had happened to his club – at that stage, attendances had plummeted dramatically from the zenith of the mid-1990s – but it was a measure of the pride which men in his mould derived from their team’s glorious spell in the spotlight that, pretty soon, Stuart was purring again at the memory of Weir embarking on one of his coruscating forays through opponents as if they were not there. Or Redpath was shipping the ball wide to Chalmers, and the latter passing on to Shiel, Joyner or Derek Stark, all of whom were capable of rousing the Greenyards’ fans to ecstasy.
That was how he wanted to remember the halcyon days when rivals used to quake in their boots at the prospect of confronting Telfer and Moffat’s hungry horde and when those of us who were sitting in the press box, who were always better treated at this venue than anywhere else in Scotland, used to wonder whether there was not something faintly miraculous happening in our midst as Melrose conjured up unlikely feats, including one special afternoon when they shoved a century of points past the hapless Stirling County and another when they amassed 89 against West of Scotland, both of whom were bewildered by the hosts’ pace and power and stamina, whatever the conditions. ‘It was always one of the things about Melrose: we were fitter than most of the opponents we came up against and that was purely down to the fact we trained harder and longer than they did,’ said Parker. ‘It meant that if things were tight and we were going into the final 20 minutes, we always fancied our chances of getting past the winning post.’
These were the kinds of exhibitions which elicited delirious approval from the home supporters and there was a clinical edge to most of Melrose’s displays which proved that they were professional in everything but name. Some questioned whether, in fact, their star recruits, such as Peter Wright, Rowen Shepherd and Derek Stark had all moved to the Borders for the sake of the scenery, the friendly welcome and the quality of the sport on offer. Yet, in the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing, we should view these comments simply as a by-product of envy and it could not have been the worst move to parade one’s skills where the likes of Telfer was watching on the periphery.
Ultimately, this was a team whose exploits merited lavish acclaim and, just as we celebrate the Green Machine and salute the methods which inspired the Teris to record-breaking achievements, so we should doff our caps to the players, coaches and officials who transformed Melrose from perennial ‘Britain in Bloom’ candidates to a community which was known all over the globe for the quality of its rugby.
It may never happen again. But it was wonderful while it lasted.