Six Nations: Scottish Rugby - Bad Results, Bad Blood, Dwindling Crowds

It is Thursday night and, overlooking the shores of Duddingston Loch, the Portobello first XV are preparing for the big one. Or at least 10 of them are. A few colts make up the numbers.

Portobello, a respected if not famous Edinburgh club, are playing Stewartry in the BT Bowl today, one of their few competitive fixtures. Like so many small Scottish clubs they have struggled in the professional era and this year dropped out of the leagues because they could not guarantee to put out a side.

They think the Scottish Rugby Union does not care about their plight and is interested only in pumping what little money there is into the three professional clubs - Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Borders. At best they are ambivalent about moves to arrest Scotland's rugby decline on and off the pitch.

"We have seen it all before," says their coach Eddie Henderson, a full-time fireman and a former Gala player.

Thirty-five miles south is Melrose, a club famous worldwide but one that sometimes struggles to put out a second XV. They are also preparing for the cup. The clubhouse is lined with pictures of former internationals, including one that shows the day when five Melrose players - Doddie Weir, Bryan Redpath, Craig Chalmers, Craig Joiner and Graham Shiel - all represented Scotland.

Melrose opposed professionalism from the start. "We argued at the time that it would drive the game to ruin and unfortunately we are not far away from that happening," says Mike Dalgetty, their director of rugby. He expects a gate of about 500 today, a far cry from 1997 when 7,000 saw Melrose beat Watsonians for the title. "Our gate that day was more than we take in a season now."

Back in Edinburgh, Scotland are preparing to face the world champions England. Earlier in the day their new coach, Matt Williams, had asked for 18 months' grace before judgment was passed on his young players.

Like Portobello and Melrose, Scotland have fared badly in the professional era. Since winning the Five Nations in 1999, they have been also-rans in the tournament while internecine strife between the professional elite and the clubs has raged.

This month the new SRU chairman David Mackay told an open day that Scottish rugby was "drinking in the last-chance saloon" and that he had called in a group of sports management consultants in an attempt to arrest the decline. Since then Scotland have lost badly to Wales in the Six Nations and the betting is that their visit to Rome on March 6 will decide this year's wooden spoon. As a cynic at Williams's press conference this week suggested: "There could be an upset . . . Scotland might win."

Last year was particularly bad. The captain Budge Pountney walked out during training for the Six Nations saying facilities were poor and the SRU was tight-fisted. In the summer Scotland went down 2-0 in South Africa and when poor displays against Wales and Ireland preceded the World Cup the Scots left for Australia hoping to make the quarter-finals. They did, but only after Tom Smith scored a try two minutes from time to take them past Fiji. The Scots boarded the plane for home leaving behind tales of late-night drinking and rifts within the camp.

Since then Williams has replaced Ian McGeechan as coach, with McGeechan replacing Jim Telfer as director of rugby. Mackay has sacked his chief executive and called in Genesis, the management consultancy that produced a damning report on the Football Association of Ireland's handling of their acrimonious World Cup campaign. They have promised their findings by April.

So there are signs of action and though they have yet to convince the likes of Portobello and Melrose, it has been enough to bring at least one rebel back on side. Telfer's final act was to launch an astonishing attack on Melrose, the side for whom he played, and a former international, John Jeffrey.

Jeffrey, the holder of 40 caps, had angered Telfer with a series of attacks on Scottish rugby. Telfer replied by saying Jeffrey "has never done anything for rugby since he retired except line his own pocket".

Four months on and Jeffrey is doing something. This week he has been preparing the Scotland Under-21 side to play England. He denies his return has anything to do with Telfer's retirement. "I have so much respect for Jim," said Jeffrey after announcing his side on Wednesday. "We've spoken since then and he said 'I don't remember saying that, but I must have said it'."

Jeffrey says he is impressed by Mackay and Williams. "If Williams is as good at coaching as he is at PR, then he's a winner. He's said the right things and involved the right people - people like Todd Blackadder. He's also got former players on board, like Finlay Calder and Gavin Hastings, who have spoken out against the regime in the past. These are characters who won't have their silences bought."

Jeffrey hopes Mackay and McGeechan will still be listening when he presents next year's budget for his Under-21s, who showed just how far Scotland are off the international pace when they went down 39-6 in Cardiff last weekend. Only two of his side did themselves justice, says Jeffrey, but when he called the squad together on Tuesday in an attempt to repair the damage, his promising centre Robert Dewey was missing because he could not get time off work.

Jeffrey fears worse is to come. He has only two professionals in his squad; England and France are totally professional. France, he says, has "90 full-time 16-year-olds - the same number of adult professionals we have in this country". This is the problem Genesis and the SRU must address: there are not enough good players to go around. Whereas possibly 500,000 play rugby in England, Scotland boasts an optimistic 10,000.

Scotland was perhaps worst equipped of the home nations for the professional revolution. In England, though several smaller sides went to the wall or merged to survive, the structures of the bigger clubs were modified with relative ease. In Wales, despite infighting on a galactic scale, particularly when nine professional clubs became five this season, supporters' allegiances and feeder routes for players from smaller clubs were already in place. Ireland already had its representative provincial system and, however limited, infrastructure in the days of amateurism.

Scotland, by comparison, was forced to create provincial structures from scratch which the existing clubs, mostly based around famous schools, were unwilling to support wholeheartedly. Fans were similarly unenthused.

Then there are the finances. In Wales, the annual grants to the five professional sides total around £7.8m. In Ireland, whose transition to professionalism has been held up as an example to the other Celtic nations, a pot of roughly £10m is divided between the four sides. According to the SRU's accounts for the year ended March 2003, Scotland's provincial budget totals £5.5m.

Frank Hadden, the Edinburgh coach, is unhappy. His is the first Scottish team to reach the knockout stages of the Heineken European Cup. This weekend, because of international call-ups at various levels, he has 24 players unavailable for the Celtic League match against Borders.

"I can assure you that Scotland are the poor relations of not just Europe but the Celtic League," says Hadden. "The Connacht playing budget - and they are the poor relations of Ireland - is £300,000 more than ours."

Hadden has been involved with professional rugby since it started in Scotland in 1997. Initially he was with Caledonian Reds but went back to teaching "when the finances went pear-shaped" and the SRU cut back from four teams to two.

Hadden believes that was when Scotland's rugby public, whose loyalties had always been with their clubs, turned against professionalism. "I came back at the tail end of that painful experience four years ago and it was tough. We couldn't afford to fly down to Wales. We had a 12-hour bus journey, no recovery time and we were knackered for the next week. One of my first results was 80-0 at Cardiff. Last year we stopped going by bus and funnily enough our away fixtures started to pick up."

He says he understands how Melrose and Portobello feel but that "professional rugby has got to be working for us to hold our place in the world order. What we have achieved is remarkable in the circumstances."