CHRIS Cusiter may well reflect that Frank Hadden's preference for Mike Blair as Scotland's first-choice scrum-half has cost him a second Lions tour. Conversely, Blair may equally reasonably consider that he would have been on the last Lions tour in 2005, if Matt Williams hadn't decided that he should play second fiddle to Cusiter. I put it like this less to suggest that either Williams or Hadden was wrong in his judgment than to indicate that there is very little between our two best
Actually, though we are fortunate to have the pair, it's perhaps not so extraordinary. We've nearly always had good scrum-halves, and competition for the No 9 Scotland jersey has frequently been every bit as intense as that between Blair and Cusiter
. Before them we had Bryan Redpath, Andy Nicoll and Gary Armstrong, players of different styles and qualities, who had this in common: they were all first-class.
Back in the 1980s Roy Laidlaw ruled the roost, restricting Selkirk's Gordon Hunter to a mere four caps. This was, of course, before the days of replacements at will, when only injury permitted substitution. If the present rules which lead to the field of play being flooded with replacements in the last quarter of a match had been in force then, Hunter would have had 20 or 30 caps. (It would be interesting to tally how many caps as a replacement add up in the case of any given player to a full 80 minutes of international rugby. Some, I guess, would need five or six caps to play the equivalent of a whole game.)
Before the Laidlaw-Hunter duel, Alan Lawson and Dougie Morgan contested the position. They were very different sorts of player: Lawson, a sharp breaker with a magnificent long pass, Morgan a terrier snapping at his forwards' heels and nipping opposing scrum-halves in the ankles. Metaphorically, I add. Morgan had the distinction of being one of very few scrum-halves to outplay the great Gareth Edwards, in a couple of famous wins at Murrayfield, Lawson of scoring two tries in a Calcutta Cup victory.
Lawson succeeded Gala's classy Duncan Paterson (uncle of Chris), who is one of only two living Scottish scrum-halves to have been a member of a victorious Scotland team at Twickenham. (The other is Roy Laidlaw.) Paterson should have had more than his handful of caps, but he was in competition with Gordon Connell (a Lion in 1968) and the remarkable Ian McCrae, who played club rugby in four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Before them there was Eck Hastie, never to be mentioned without his Melrose and Scotland partner, David Chisholm. The pair were never on the losing side in their first ten international matches – not, you understand, that Scotland had a ten-match unbeaten run. The selectors in those days were always chopping and changing.
There were others whose careers were short – Gala's Brian Shillinglaw, who went over to Rugby League, for instance – or who had fewer caps than their ability merited, simply because of the quality of the man in possession. Rory Lawson today comes in this category, as did Greig Oliver, understudy first to Laidlaw (when Hunter retired) and then Gary Armstrong. He was a very fine player, but there was always the feeling that he had been insufficiently tested in adversity, having at club level too easy a time of it behind the Hawick pack in the days when the Green Machine was well-oiled and running powerfully.
Why do we so consistently produce top-class scrum-halves? One reason doubtless is that few Scottish No 9s ever have an easy ride. They must often live off scraps and make use of ball that is less than good. So they are toughened by adversity. But this ought to apply – or to have applied until very recently – to Irish scrum-halves too. Yet for years Ireland lacked a top-quality scrum-half. They had some good ones, like Michael Bradley, but, good though he was, he wouldn't have got into the Scotland side.
There have been some very good English scrum-halves – Dickie Jeeps, Nigel Melville and Matt Dawson among them – but in my lifetime the best scrum-halves have come from Scotland and Wales. One of the first times I saw Mike Blair play, I said "that boy's going to be as good as Rob Howley", at that time the best scrum-half in the northern hemisphere. Now, thanks to his belated call-up to the Lions, he has the chance to force himself into the Test XV, and prove he is indeed now the best. If he does so, however, he'll have no time to rest on his laurels for, come the autumn, Chris Cusiter will again be challenging him hard.
The full article contains 814 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
