Scotland’s early World Cup exit threatens to relegate us into the second tier unless we move smartly

Let’s suspend disbelief temporarily and imagine another hypothetical situation: Scotland score one try against Argentina and grab another touchdown against England to top Pool B. In the quarter-final they play France– the most fractured and shambolic national side since, well, France at last year’s football World Cup rather than the fired-up Gallic heroes who turned up yesterday – and Scotland unexpectedly find themselves in the semi-finals with only Wales standing between them and the final.

That was the potential prize on offer, and the Scots came mighty close to grabbing it with some wholehearted displays that were, typically, a little lacking in vision and skills. A win against Argentina seemed a drop dead certainty with ten minutes to go and England were there for the taking, especially if the Scots had not had their attention distracted by the eight-point margin required on the day. As Andy Robinson is fond of reminding us, these things are decided by inches rather than miles and that fact that Scotland came up agonisingly short should not necessarily scream “crisis” at the heart of the Scottish game.

So we won’t, but still there is cause to be a little less sanguine about the bigger picture. The team has sunk to tenth place in the IRB rankings, exactly where Scotland were when Andy Robinson was appointed, and once you are on the slippery slope it can be hard to stop the slide.

Argentina will enter the southern hemisphere’s “Four Nations” next season and while it will be hard begin with, the move is priceless for the long term health of rugby in South America. It will bring regular competition, television audiences and oodles of money into the cash-starved Argentine game.

The Scots’ woes in New Zealand were underlined by the success of their Celtic cousins who have done as much as anyone to spark this tournament into life. Wales are through to the last four with an even money chance of running on to the field for the final on 23 October. Despite exiting yesterday Ireland have left an indelible impression upon the World Cup by beating Australia and proving that the northern hemisphere contribution does not start and stop with the stop/start rugby showcased by England for much of this tournament. Two-thirds of Celtic rugby is in rude health but Scotland must now wonder if they can still command a place at the sport’s top table.

“I don’t think that it’s inevitable that Scotland will drop into the second tier of rugby nations, but I do believe it’s possible,” says former Scotland skipper Gavin Hastings from Auckland, where he watched the Scots go down fighting last weekend.

“They played some good rugby against England but unless you are able to score tries then how can you ever hope to win a game?

“Give players the element of competition that they need and the right structure to allow them to compete at the highest level, but we are not doing that. I don’t know what the correct structure is but I don’t think that one try per match, which would have been enough to see us top the group, is too much to ask. It’s been an Achilles’ heel for several years now.”

Tries have been a problem for Scotland, and Robinson has been about as useful as a rain dance in alleviating the drought. His win percentages are well ahead of Frank Hadden’s (50 per cent against 39 per cent) but when it comes to tries the former coach is sitting pretty. Under Hadden Scotland scored 74 tries at a rate of 1.8 per game and if that can’t quite match the Harlem Globetrotters it’s still streets ahead of the 20 touchdowns in 24 matches (at 0.8 per match) under Robinson.

If Scotland’s grasp on top-class Test rugby is being loosened, no-one can say that they weren’t warned because the team have been teetering on the edge of the cliff for some time. As far back as the 2003 World Cup the Scots needed a late, late try from Tom Smith to nose their way into the quarter-finals at the expense of Fiji. Four years ago they held their breath in St Etienne as a penalty from David Bortolussi to win the game for Italy sailed past the posts.

It’s been coming and now, for the first time ever, the World Cup quarter-finals are taking place without Scotland.

The optimists will point to a first-ever series win in Argentina and home victories against both the Wallabies and the Springboks in recent years, and those results were genuinely impressive. They were also friendlies.

That is not to say that the matches were meaningless, just to point out that in the heat of battle, when the rugby world is watching Scotland play full-on competitive Test match rugby, in recent years they have generally failed. The early World Cup exit was preceded by just two wins in ten matches in the Six Nations.

From a historical perspective the Six Nations statistics make for uneasy reading:

In the 1960s Scotland won 38 per cent of their matches (P40, W15, L22, D3). In the 1970s Scotland won 33 per cent (P39, W13, L24, D2). In the 1980s Scotland won 45 per cent (P40, W18, L20, D2). In the 1990s Scotland won 53 per cent (P40, W21, L18, D1). In the 2000s Scotland won 28 per cent (P50, W14, L35, D1). So far, in the 2010s Scotland have won 20 per cent (P10, W2, L7, D1).

Even allowing for better than average results in the golden era of the 1980s and 1990s, the figures are worrying. With Italy entering the competition in 2000 the Scottish stats should have headed north but instead their winning percentage fell off a cliff and it’s down to just one thing. While professionalism officially started in 1996, it took several years to get a proper grip on the game and Scotland have struggled ever since.

The injection of money into what had been a dusty, old traditional sport concentrated the mind wonderfully well on one thing... winning. In the new dog-eat-dog world of pro rugby, the countries with greater resources in terms of playing numbers, spectators and sponsors should, over the course, do better than those countries without those assets, and Scotland is amongst the game’s paupers. This does not necessitate failure but it does make success much harder to achieve.

This is where the parallel with the national XV kicks in because Scottish rugby needs to be much smarter both on and off the field. It needs innovative coaches and forward thinking executives because if they are content just to copy what the other nations are doing then Scottish rugby will almost certainly fail given the numbers disadvantage. Those running the sport need to be smarter and nimble when for too long they have been sluggish and stupider.

Most of all, Scottish rugby needs to reach out beyond the traditional base and that means changing people’s perceptions of what has always been seen as a private school sport. Scottish rugby needs to transform itself from an elite activity into a mass spectator sport, oh, and if we can unearth the next Brian McDriscoll into the bargain then so much the better.

Scotland are not necessarily doomed to a slow slide into international irrelevance but, just as the national team needs a little inspiration to go with the rivers of perspiration, it is going to take more than honest, hard graft to prevent it happening.