Disdain for Celtic League Is Depriving Scotland of Success

Summary

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LAST Friday evening, Edinburgh lost to Ulster at Ravenhill. You may have noticed but you almost certainly didn't go and probably don't care much either way. Edinburgh's coach, Frank Hadden, will have trundled out various excuses but, as a paid employee of the SRU, he almost certainly didn't offer the most relevant one - that since the national coach Matt Williams had only returned his test players to him the day before the Ulster match that defeat was a sure thing.

Ahead of the autumn internationals, the players were regularly returned for pro-team duty absolutely washed out after one or two days of highly physical training with the national squad and the pro- teams could do little but rest them during the first day back. The pro-teams are at the centre of what is wrong with Scottish rugby, eating a huge budget for next to no return and it cannot go on. The top-down approach to coaching is fundamental to the current malaise and, however tempting, there is no point blaming Williams.

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Extract

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Disdain for Celtic League Is Depriving Scotland of Success

I haven't seen the Australian coach's contract but I'm willing to bet that it says almost nothing about pro-team rugby in Scotland. Williams has been hired to coach Scotland's top squad to achi...

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