THE BORDER REIVERS
FIASCO
ON A LATE Tuesday morning in March 2007, the media were invited to Murrayfield for what was described as an important policy announcement by the Scottish Rugby Union. It was one of those instances when nobody was entirely sure what might be about to unfold, although there had been reports for weeks in advance that the governing body was poised to implement drastic action to reduce costs in their three professional teams, Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Border Reivers, which were losing significant amounts of money and failing to hit any kind of heights in the Magners League Cup and Heineken Cup.
Once the various press and broadcasting outlets had arrived at the stadium, the ashen faces, fidgety shuffling and slightly embarrassed demeanours of the SRU chief executive, Gordon McKie, and the union’s chairman, Allan Munro, indicated that good news was off the agenda. Instead, and despite their best efforts to focus the Fourth Estate’s minds on the fact that they intended to increase investment in the Glasgow Warriors, the only item which mattered in their press release was the adjoining confirmation that the Reivers were being closed down at the end of the season. And though these gloomy tidings might not have been wholly unexpected when one examined the mediocre results and paltry attendances which the Netherdale-based team had been attracting in previous months, there was still a sense of anger as the implications became clear. This, after all, was not the first occasion when the Borders had been hung out to dry by the SRU.
Munro, for his part, argued that it was unrealistic to carry on ploughing capital into a failing business and yet the caution with which he picked his words underlined his realisation that he was treading through a sporting minefield, the more so, given the number of Border-based journalists and broadcasters who were in the same room.
‘The decision has not been an easy one. But we believe the Reivers’ closure and strengthening Glasgow will go some way towards improving high-performance rugby in Scotland,’ he told the throng, several of whom were waiting to vent their anger, and duly flung piles of ordure in the administration’s faces the following morning. ‘We recognise the contribution which Border coaches and players have made, and their determination to succeed against the odds. But it was quite clear that we could not continue as we were, and something had to be done if we were to maintain professional rugby in Scotland.’
Within the next few days, the backlash was in full spate. McKie, rightly or wrongly, was perceived as a ‘bloody bean-counter’, attacked as being somebody who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing, and was further castigated for his alleged paucity of rugby knowledge and background in the sport. On the following Thursday, 29 March, the Scottish Borders Council approved an emergency motion, arguing that the sport was integral to the region’s identity and culture. ‘Rugby is woven into the social fabric of the Borders. It is a generator of trade and income. It attracts tourists and visitors to the Borders from across the world and it is part of what creates the worldwide affinity with the Scottish Borders and, through rugby, it has contributed hugely to Scottish life.’
None of this was in question, but the problem was that all the subsequent sound and fury added up to precious little in terms of providing potential solutions: in which sense, it was a microcosm of the dismal fashion in which Scotland had reacted to the challenge of moving away from the amateur era and getting to grips with professionalism. A decade earlier, the SRU, spurred on by their director of rugby, Jim Telfer, and his former Scotland team-mate, Duncan Paterson, had pressed the case for districts as the best way forward and, even while some of the country’s leading clubs protested that they should be allowed to enter the Heineken Cup, the union seized the initiative by placing around 120 players on contracts and setting up four provincial teams in Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Border Reivers and the Caledonia Reds (formerly the North and Midlands). This policy provoked a mixture of fury and consternation from some quarters, with officials at Melrose, for example, asking why rugby’s governing body had chosen to fund professionalism, when there would have been an almighty ruckus if their SFA counterparts had gone down a similar route in bankrolling Rangers and Celtic. It was a rational contention, but the trouble was that the SRU had a plan and were primed to act, while their opponents did not and procrastinated. And although there was a small sprinkling of clubs who talked about mergers or discussed following the path adopted by Glasgow Hawks, the majority were either too frightened or too complacent to threaten the sort of breakaway from the SRU which was mooted at various stages of the argument. Instead, they resorted to leaking selective pieces of information to various newspapers, which made a few rugby hacks feel akin to Woodward and Bernstein for a period, but whose appeal soon palled when it was clear that these men (they were all men!) were expecting us to do their dirty work for them by waging war against the SRU.
The next few years brought predictable confusion and resentment to Scottish rugby at exactly the time when the administrators should have been striving for consensus and building bridges. Waffle proliferated on both sides. Paterson predicted that the four district selects would soon convert the sceptics and he forecast that they would be drawing crowds of 15,000 within the space of three years, which was at best wildly optimistic, and at worst a naked diversionary tactic. Telfer, so astute and inspirational in devising tactics to beat opponents on the field, suddenly appeared out of touch, apparently hell-bent on importing a New Zealand-style structure to his homeland despite the obvious differences between the two nations. But the clubs, too, were stricken by internal dissent and their actions were often a consequence of narrow self-interest, while the more progressive elements, who mentioned such ideas as club co-operatives or the grass roots organisations creating a rugby version of the SPL, were drowned out by the nay-sayers, who disagreed with the SRU, but could not come up with an alternative.
Even when four of Scotland’s biggest names – Finlay Calder, Jim Aitken, David Sole and Gavin Hastings – launched a well-publicised crusade, calling for the scrapping of the new district structure in early 1997 and subsequently issuing a searing condemnation of the SRU’s stewardship of the game, they discovered that all their kudos in Test rugby mattered for little when it came to gathering votes at the annual general meeting. ‘We are four belligerent individuals and maybe that is why we have not been invited to give our views in an official capacity at Murrayfield,’ said Calder. ‘But this isn’t about personalities. It is about the future of the Scottish game and if the SRU wins, that game will die.’
In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the club circuit nearly collapsed in a slagheap of apathy – they had been deprived of the services of nearly all their leading luminaries and the public found alternative sources of entertainment. I can remember going to Myreside one Saturday in 1997 and there were police traffic cones and a posse of stewards inside and outside the ground – and the ‘crowd’ was no more than 150. Even in the Borders, the spectators began to pick and choose their fixtures and, as one might have anticipated, they tended to plump for their local derbies in the Border League which meant that, in less than two years, an organisation such as Melrose had to deal with up to half their support base going AWOL when it came to championship matches.
If the hope was that the districts would turn things around with results on the pitch, that proved equally misguided. Glasgow travelled down to Leicester and conceded more than 90 points at Welford Road and such was the ease with which the Tigers mauled their Scottish opponents that Dean Richards, who had been complaining of an upset stomach, strolled off the pitch at one stage, relieved himself in the lavatory, and returned to the fray without his team bothering to replace him in the interim period. The SRU’s finances, meanwhile, were equally going down the toilet, and, to almost nobody’s surprise, their debt level soared to the extent where even the likes of Telfer and Paterson recognised the need for ‘retrenchment’. The original four teams were reduced to two, with the merger of Glasgow and Caledonia and Edinburgh and the Borders; a move which led to many players losing their jobs and relocating to England, France, or roles outwith rugby.
If this short-term pain had been the catalyst for increased success on the international stage, the Murrayfield hierarchy might just about have been able to survive the crescendo of criticism from those who proclaimed that they were letting the sport wither on the vine. But, if anything, the opposite was true. In 1998, the Scots endured a demoralising sequence of comprehensive defeats after Jim Telfer returned to the coaching job in place of David Johnston and Richie Dixon, who had been peremptorily sacked in January. However, if anything, the slide intensified with Telfer’s charges being thrashed 51–26 by Fiji in Suva and demolished 45–3 by the Australians in Sydney. Even more damningly, they had earlier subsided to an emphatic 51–16 loss against the French at Murrayfield, where the sight of significant numbers of supporters heading for the exits long before the climax spoke volumes for the disenchantment which had permeated the game less than a decade after David Sole had slow-marched his troops to Grand Slam glory over England at the same venue. Eventually, Paterson resigned in December of that year, but the bickering carried on unabated. And while it did, the SRU’s debt level reached crisis levels and led some to speculate that the banks were effectively in control.
At that juncture, only the most dewy-eyed Micawberish sprite would have predicted that the Scots would rally to win the last Five Nations Championship a few months later, bolstered by the tremendous efforts of such Borders stalwarts at Gary Armstrong, Gregor Townsend and Alan Tait, whose return from the rugby league ranks was one of the few positive developments amid the mounting gloom. Yet, if anybody envisaged that the Scottish public would suddenly transfer their allegiance to the so-called ‘super-districts’ on the back on the national team’s heroics, it was to prove a forlorn hope. By the turn of the millennium, even as the internecine warfare continued, many fans had found other diversions. Stuart Henderson, the Melrose secretary, rang me on the Friday before a tussle with Boroughmuir and told me: ‘We are dealing in hundreds [of fans] down here rather than thousands these days. They still take an interest in the Sevens and they might still come along to the Border League matches with Hawick and Gala, but they’re all really disillusioned. Where is this going to end, Neil? Where is it going to end?’
To be honest, it was a question which remains unanswered, despite the strategic reviews, such as the one conducted by Lord Mackay of Clashfern in 1999, the incessant sabre-rattling at AGMs, and the appointment of high-profile figures such as Andy Irvine and the current incumbent, Ian MacLauchlan. There was a window of opportunity to make genuine progress following another bout of committee-room carnage in 2005, which led to the resignations of the respected chairman of the SRU’s executive board, David Mackay, and the governing body’s innovative chief executive, Phil Anderton, as the prelude to Murrayfield finally scrapping their discredited general committee. Yet, when one travels around the country, whether it is to Melrose, where Craig Chalmers and his charges have recently sparked a renaissance, or such forward-looking clubs as Ayr and Currie, any optimism tends to be tempered by continuing dissatisfaction, especially in the grass roots environs with the way the SRU justifies spending between £8m and £10m a year on their two professional entities when both are still struggling to draw crowds in excess of 3,000, and whose recent performances against their Celtic League rivals have been mired in mediocrity.
It is in this context that one should consider the ham-fisted fashion by which the SRU’s initial four regions were trimmed to two, then upped to three again with the restoration of the Borders in 2002, prior to the latter’s disbandment five years later. It must have been obvious, given the dearth of support for what were widely perceived to be centrally-controlled marionettes, forever in thrall to the Murrayfield puppet masters, that these regional sides badly needed to be granted autonomy to run their own affairs and thrive or die in the free markets. But the process never ever happened. Indeed, one wonders whether Telfer, who has been widely praised in these pages, but whose talents as a player and coach scarcely extended to administrative excellence, actually wanted the Reivers to be resuscitated in the first place.
After all, as he wrote in his autobiography: ‘I was delighted when we saw the light at the end of the tunnel in the push for a third professional team.’ But then, on the next page, he added:
Of all the areas, when the four-team scenario was created, Caledonia was the one which really grasped it with enthusiasm. They played at football grounds and youngsters got right in behind it and there remains a very positive approach to the game.
What people at some Border clubs have not yet grasped is that their enemy is not the professional team. If there is an enemy, it is the city teams, because of the natural and increasing drift of young people to cities … The pendulum of strength in club rugby has swung towards the central Lowlands, especially in Edinburgh and Glasgow. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them are the increasing opportunities in tertiary education, employment and worldwide travel, and the Borders has struggled to compete. Even though the sport is uniquely a way of life here, I don’t think Border teams will ever dominate Scottish rugby again [my italics] – but if they were to use the professional team to their advantage, then they could rediscover success.
It is difficult to know where to begin in highlighting the inherent flaws in this argument. Firstly, where on earth is the sense in handing money to football clubs when Scottish rugby is in such financial dire straits? Next, if Telfer was so impressed with the Caledonian set-up, why did he not propose they were the ones who were brought back to life in 2002? Thirdly, where is the recognition that no Borders team was ever going to succeed while every decision about its affairs was signed, sealed and delivered with the Murrayfield imprimatur? Yet that latter factor was one of the major reasons why people in the South were so lukewarm about the Reivers organisation which landed on their doorstep. One of their former officials told me as much, on a confidential basis, the gist of which was as follows: ‘If anybody had sat down and talked to us, we would have advised the SRU it was best to take matches around the region, some to Netherdale, others to Mansfield Park and the Greenyards, and we would have built up the brand by liaising with the Border League clubs and ensuring there were no clashes between the Magners League fixtures and the Sevens tournaments down here. It’s only common sense that you speak to all the relevant parties and make them feel they are valued. But Jim effectively told us that it was the Reivers or nothing and that our local clubs would no longer be able to compete with the big city teams, and that was the end of the matter. Border people don’t like being presented with these sorts of arrangements and they reacted accordingly. You would have imagined that Jim might have known that, given his background, but there was a blind spot with him when it came to the pro sides.’
These reservations, which ranged from mild scepticism to outright hostility, explained why the South, for all the enterprise of such coaches as Tony Gilbert, Rob Moffat and Steve Bates and the progressive attitude of their chief executive, Alastair Cranston, were always climbing up Everest with a piano on their backs. It was one thing for massed ranks of Borderers to get collectively behind a team featuring 15 home-grown players in the mould of Chalmers and Armstrong, Tait and Townsend, but quite another thing for them to have a composite squad foisted on them. They could support the former, whether they were beating the Australians or being trounced by the All Blacks, but there was no particular affinity with the disparate personnel who pitched up at Netherdale. Yes, they worked hard, yes they were wholehearted competitors, but any connection between them and the proud South ensembles of the past was purely coincidental. And when the team’s crowds regularly slipped below 2,000, even though this was proportionally far superior to the modest numbers who turned up to watch Glasgow and Edinburgh, it sent out a clear signal to the SRU that the Reivers were heading on an expensive road to nowhere.
Hence, the media’s summons to that conference at Murrayfield in March 2007, followed by the slightly absurd scenes thereafter of Border politicians getting whipped up into a frenzy of righteous indignation, approximately five years too late. There were the usual Internet-inspired campaigns to launch demonstrations and take the fight to the SRU, but, in the event, the breast-beating simply presaged a rather low-key finale for the Borders when they hosted the Ospreys in Galashiels on May 13. The Scotsman reported:
The curtain finally came down on the Reivers in an emotional night at Netherdale. Despite the fact their fate had been determined a few weeks ago, the Reivers played with a professionalism which belied their league status and it was not until James Hook’s penalty in injury time that the Ospreys put daylight between them, the new Magners League champions, and the disbanded Reivers. It was almost surreal as the fireworks lit up the evening sky, the ticker tape littered the pitch, and the champagne popped. To their credit, the home supporters stayed and applauded as they had done when Gregor Townsend left the field, where he made his senior debut, to a standing ovation.
There was satisfaction that Kelly Brown, who is expected to join Glasgow [which he did] was named man of the match and there were equal measures of contentment that the Borders had bowed out with dignity and passion. They were not overawed, but seemed inspired by the occasion, in front of the 1,837 crowd, a good number in view of the popular Jed-Forest Sevens, which were being played 18 miles down the road.
Yet, it can now be revealed that the decision to swing the axe on the Borders was not some hastily-reached judgement made by the SRU’s committee in a few days or weeks prior to the announcement on 27 March. On the contrary – and this information came from a high-ranking former Murrayfield official – their death knell was sounded on the afternoon of 9 December in the previous year when they entertained the European giants of Biarritz at Netherdale, in what was supposed be a high-profile clash, and only 1,373 supporters could be bothered to pay their admission money. ‘It was a non-event, on and off the pitch, because the Borders were beaten heavily [25–0], but the match was being shown on Sky and the pundits could find nothing to talk about at the end, except that there was nobody watching in what was supposed to be a rugby-mad region,’ intimated my contact. ‘It was clear, that afternoon, it just couldn’t go on.’
My source, who requested anonymity, added that he has attended several meetings, both before and after the confirmation of the Reivers closure, and these had convinced him of three things. Firstly, that while there was a lot of noisy protest in the immediate aftermath of the SRU’s action, this merely reflected the opinions of a ‘very small’ number of people and that their anger was not even shared by the majority of club members when the likes of the then SRU president Andy Irvine, chairman Allan Munro and chief executive Gordon McKie travelled down to the Borders to spell out why they had implemented the closure of the professional side. They arrived expecting a firestorm, but instead were greeted with a few glum faces and shrugs of the shoulders. Secondly, that a group of that Borders squad, ‘including two or three experienced internationalists’, were themselves so disenchanted with the side’s long-term failure to capture the imagination of the public in the South of the country that they had already intimated to Murrayfield that they wanted to leave the club at the end of the 2006–07 campaign. Thirdly, and probably most significantly in the bigger picture, the SRU had attempted to discuss entering into partnerships with a number of investors, and there were people prepared to talk about sponsoring Glasgow and Edinburgh, but absolutely nobody came forward when similar overtures were made in the Borders. This, of course, is very difficult to refute or confirm, especially given the confidentiality agreements which seem to be installed in the contracts of most sports administrators these days, but if it is true, it adds up to a bleak scenario where the Reivers’ fate was sealed, long before the story hit the press.
At any rate, it brought down the curtain on what had been a pretty poor show. One can blame the SRU for their control freakery, condemn those who focused more on budgets than being flexible in their strategies, and launch facile potshots at the Murrayfield panjandrums who steered Scotland down the dreaded district route in the first place. But there again, let’s think about it a minute. The architects of that ‘master plan’ from the 1990s were Telfer and Paterson, who were born in Melrose and Galashiels respectively. The chief executive of the Reivers, when they sprang back to life, was Cranston, one of the proudest names in the Border firmament, while such stellar talents as Ross Ford, Gregor Townsend and Bruce Douglas were involved in the underwhelming Biarritz defeat.
So there should have been no shortage of Border passion or supporters. Yet, as Simon Turnbull wrote in the Independent the following day:
The bright midday sunshine could have been transported from home, but the chill from the morning frost offered a sharp reminder that this was the Borders of Scotland, not Biarritz. Still, the surreal sight of Serge Blanco getting stuck into a burger, against the backdrop of the Eildon Hills, suggested that the rugby aristocrats from the Atlantic coast of south-west France might not be lacking in appetite against the artisans from the foot of the Magners League.
Biarritz might have blown their last Heineken Cup match on British soil, their four-point loss to Munster in last season’s final in Cardiff, but in Galashiels, there was no [Paul] O’Connell, [Donncha] O’Callaghan or [Ronan] O’Gara in the opposition ranks – and no 16th man to face in the form of 50,000 opposition fans. Instead, there were huge gaps around the ground, although the presence of Blanco and several Santa-hatted Basques took the attendance up to all of 1,373, and, on the pitch, there were far too many visiting players who were capable of punching holes in the home guard. Still, at least the gulf on the scoreboard stopped short of entering humiliation territory …
The whole tone of this report spells out why the Reivers were sacrificed. When there is no atmosphere, when once-packed stadiums are pitifully empty, and there were even rumours that many people were more interested in attending the opening of a new supermarket in Jedburgh than watching high-class European rugby that afternoon, it was probably time to call a halt on the whole creaking edifice. It might, of course, have been more sensible if the SRU had actually delivered this message at the time rather than accentuating their commitment to the Glasgow Warriors, but there again, the production of Scotland’s approach to professionalism has been in the grand tradition of slapstick and farce and this is one pantomime where there is no immediate end to the run. That will only materialise if and when the other teams are allowed to live or die by the tenets of the free market and are permitted to escape the stifling constraints of state ownership.
The only bright spot in this dismal narrative has been the re-emergence of Scotland’s club organisations, who have picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, and started to generate their own revenue streams, while encouraging significantly more supporters to come through the turnstiles than was the case a decade ago when several officials at the grass roots spoke gloomily about the imminent demise of the sport and their consternation was clearly sincere. Mercifully, though, matters have improved, with Melrose, as usual, at the forefront of the developments, winning a raft of prizes in 2011, and even though it may be difficult to orchestrate a return to the glory days of the early 1990s, they are being pursued by Ayr, Currie and Glasgow Hawks, and several other well-organised teams who have displayed the requisite gumption and gallus attitude to transcend their difficulties and emerge from their travails with the approach that nobody owes them any favours. Ultimately, given the knowledge that there is no spare cash in the SRU coffers and that people have to be persuaded to reconnect with the club circuit, the only means of guaranteeing their survival and preparing for the future is via their own efforts.
In which light, there should not be an excess of lamentations for the demise of the Reivers and certainly not the team which struggled to make any significant impact between 2002 and 2007. Better, surely, for the other sides in the South to hunt down Melrose afresh than fling good money after bad. And the signs are that the clubs are finally working in unison and collaborating on joint ventures. It is just a pity that it did not happen 15 years ago.