A Programme Full of Stuffing Nonsense; Club Rugby; Alasdair Reid Believes the Plethora of Matches Scheduled by the Sru Is Harming the Game

Summary

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As an illustration of the folly of taking a little talent too far, this weekend's rugby programme is right up there with the literary efforts of Jeffrey Archer, Dido's last album and Victoria Beckham's entire career. Not, you suspect, that Scotland's rugby authorities actually care that such comparisons might be drawn, for in scheduling such an ugly pile-up of club, pro-team and international matches into a three-day window of opportunism, their guiding principle has clearly been one of 'never mind the quality, feel the width'.

Of course width, in a different context, has been a divisive subject these past few days, but the apoplectic reaction of Eddie Jones, the Australia coach, to the SRU wheeze that narrowed the Murrayfield pitch by five metres last weekend might come to be remembered as a fittingly acrimonious motif for this autumn's entire Test series. When the obfuscatory mists created by the venting spleens of various clubs, coaches and (strictly off the record, mind) union time-servers have finally cleared, the unavoidable conclusion will surely be that the game's thorniest problems have been created by its rulers attempts to squeeze quarts of rugby into pint-pot vessels belonging to a not-particularly-thirsty audience.

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A Programme Full of Stuffing Nonsense; Club Rugby; Alasdair Reid Believes the Plethora of Matches Scheduled by the Sru Is Harming the Game

Yet while we have learned to accept that grimly ironic scenario whereby rugby officials call for fewer demands on players while sch...

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