Ireland should beware one last Telfer miracle

SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP/Scotland v Ireland: Ireland should win at Murrayfield but, says Kevin Ferry, Jim Telfer and Ian McGeechan have produced surprises before

Scottish rugby could hardly be in greater disarray it would seem.

For the eighth successive year the Heineken European Cup quarter-finals are Scot free and after Edinburgh and Glasgow managed to take advantage of the international demands on Ireland's provinces during the Celtic League pool stages to earn home draws in the quarter-finals those opportunities were also squandered.

Meanwhile two former Scotland captains - John Leslie and Budge Pountney - have quit the national scene, the latter departing last month offering a litany of complaints about how players are looked after.

There is, too, the not insubstantial matter of Murrayfield's debt burden. Both Ireland's Celtic neighbours have debt hanging over them after building new national stadiums, but where the Welsh figure runs to tens of millions and rising, Scotland's is extremely manageable at around the £10 million mark.

It will build over the next 12 months as a result of lost revenues in World Cup year. However, Graham Ireland, the Scottish Union's finance director, has compared the current overdraft with a householder having a £10,000 mortgage on a £100,000 property.

Unlike Lansdowne Road and the Millennium Stadium, Murrayfield looks onto a vast acreage of SRU-owned land in central Edinburgh. To describe the development value as £100 million would be extremely conservative.

More important still, in political terms Scottish rugby has endured its pain. The clubs versus districts (provinces) battle took place four years ago. A major review was conducted, heads rolled and the committee structure was overhauled.

It is by no means running perfectly yet, but Scottish rugby knows exactly where it stands as far as the professional game is concerned.

In Ireland, meanwhile, the existing vibrant provincial set-up was much better able to cope with the transition from an amateur game to a professional one, while youth rugby has traditionally been much stronger than in Scotland.

However in the great Connacht debate it became obvious that even with all the success enjoyed in cross-border competition, financial reality is biting even before the lovely, but near derelict Lansdowne Road has been dealt with.

Limitless funds are not available for professional rugby. Every club player cannot expect a wage. Resources must be concentrated on a chosen few to whose lifestyle the rest aspire. We gloomy but prudent Scots identified this early and have paid a substantial price in competitive terms.

As matters were sorted out the premature departures of Pountney and Leslie from Test rugby brought back memories of a threatened strike by the exiles ahead of the last World Cup. They return from international duty to their English clubs, compare notes with relatively pampered counterparts from other countries and feel unloved.

The home-based professional teams, meanwhile, struggle to compete because they focus on Scottish qualified players, while the relationship between the SRU and clubs is only now beginning to be rebuilt amidst lingering mutual suspicion.

Yet these remain the early days of professionalism and an environment is being created where the best Scottish talent can flourish. This is, too, a nation which until very recently depended almost exclusively on the tiny Borders district and private schools to produce players, meaning only around two per cent of Scottish schoolboys were even exposed to rugby.

That is now being addressed but it takes time, particularly since the state school system has never recovered from a teachers strike in the mid-eighties which saw the vast majority end all involvement in extra-curricular sport.

Yet it is against that background that 18 years have elapsed since Ireland won at Murrayfield despite having been favourites on all bar one or two of the nine visits made in that period. Indeed whether over the last five, 10 or 20 years Scotland's record against both Celtic rivals is a winning one.

This has been almost entirely down to two men, Jim Telfer who became Scotland coach in 1981 and the first national director of rugby in 1993, and Ian McGeechan, in his second spell as head coach. Under Telfer's guidance a country that had not won the International Championship since World War II claimed the Grand Slam in 1984. Then McGeechan, with Telfer as his forwards coach, emulated the feat six years later.

When they tried to take a back seat on the coaching front in the mid-90s a string of humiliating defeats saw Telfer reluctantly reclaim the reins in 1998. The following year the championship was won in the grand manner, a five-try extravaganza in Paris providing a glorious finish.

Thereafter McGeechan took over again and while handicapped by a shortage of fast twitch muscles which remains a major genetic problem for Scotland, there have been great days including the first Calcutta Cup win in a decade to deny England a Grand Slam and, whisper it, the stylish win over Ireland which probably cost Warren Gatland his job in September 2001.

Once again, though, Ireland travel this weekend to a rugby nation racked with self-doubt and do so as odds-on favourites.

Surely Scotland cannot maintain their Murrayfield stranglehold over the country that has dominated the Celtic League so far and has two very strong contenders for this season's European Cup, though.

Probably not, but after last year's bout of ill health Telfer returned to the national team's coaching set-up this season as one of McGeechan's assistants. Scotland achieved a first ever three match clean sweep of wins in the autumn series as well as a first win over the South Africa since 1969.

This will be Telfer's last season as the nation's director of rugby and McGeechan's last as head coach as he prepares to take Telfer's chair. So while in terms of personnel Ireland should win at a canter tomorrows the debt owed to those men for guiding Scottish rugby through some horribly troubled times is enormous and the Scottish players know it.