by Tim Wigmore
Traditionally Scotland has had a superior cricket team to Ireland. In 2005 they proved as much by comfortably beating Ireland in the final of the ICC Trophy; the previous year, Scotland had been the inaugural winners of the Intercontinental Cup, the first-class competition for non-Test sides. Scotland were the best associate side around, and there was nothing to suggest the trajectory that Ireland and Scotland would take over the following decade. ‘We just fell off a cliff after that – we thought we were going to dominate for a number of years,’ Hamilton reflected. ‘We should have developed massively and kicked on hugely from 2005.’
An opportunity was missed to advance cricket in Scotland. ‘There could have been a far bigger push to market cricket in Scotland,’ a player in the 2005 side asserted. ‘If we’d professionalised the environment in 2005 with a whole host of really good experienced cricketers and then started introducing youngsters I think we’d still be ahead of Ireland.’
Luck undeniably played a part. Scotland’s reward for their ICC Trophy victory was to be put in the same group as Australia and South Africa at the 2007 World Cup. It was the cricketing equivalent of a hospital pass and ensured that Scotland emulated the traditions of the football team in the World Cup: Scotland are said to always ‘arrive home before the postcards’ when they qualify. Ireland were drawn with Pakistan, West Indies and Zimbabwe: three Test nations but each distinctly vulnerable, as Ireland would demonstrate.
Petty squabbling also hampered Scotland. The coach who led Scotland to the ICC Trophy in 2005, Andy Moles, was forced out by a coterie of senior players. Hamilton later called it a ‘strange decision’. Perhaps the squad did not approve of Moles’s assessment of the culmination of the 2005 county season, ‘It was a tired, listless group of players who finished the season, and it dawned on me how unfit they were, both physically and mentally.’
As John Blain, Brown and Hamilton edged towards retirement, Scotland were not producing similarly talented players. ‘I don’t think the young players believed in themselves enough when it came to the crunch,’ reflected Gordon Drummond, who played for Scotland between 2007 and 2014.
In their desperation, the selectors turned to players from Australia or South Africa who had settled in Scotland, and qualified for the side after living there for four years. Often these players were not any better than the Scots that they replaced, and their selection sent a terrible message to locally-reared cricketers.
After Scotland’s failure to be one of four associate qualifiers for the 2011 World Cup, Ian Stanger lamented the rise of ‘Jock Boks’ and asked, “Why do we persist in handing out Scotland jerseys to players with foreign accents on the evidence of a few games? Why do we have a tendency not to rate our own guys and abandon rather than seek to support their development?’
Stanger likened the selectors to ‘kids in the candy shop, unable to resist the temptation to try something new in favour of a more tried and tested choice’. It was a view shared by Hamilton, ‘In the early years, Scotland were guilty of picking them just because they were from Australia or South Africa.’
All the while, Ireland were surging forwards, determined that their success in 2007 should not be an end-point in itself but the catalyst for transforming cricket in the country. ‘Ireland spotted an opportunity and were very ambitious and proactive and aggressively chased the dream,’ a Cricket Scotland employee told me. ‘We were a little bit more conservative in our approach.’
Perhaps it is no wonder that fans were not captivated. Where Ireland fans saw a side with the self-belief that they could cause upsets, Scotland supporters complained of a side that was accepting of defeat. After a 189-run loss to Australia in 2009, the captain Hamilton said, ‘I’m very happy with the way we handled ourselves in the last 10 overs of their innings because they could have gone on to get 400.’ It is unimaginable that any Irishman in the post-2007 era would utter similar words.
It took a glorious day in September 2013 to put into perspective just how far Ireland and Scotland’s fortunes had diverged. To prepare for their ODI series, both Australia and England were playing an ODI against the nearby associates. It was a rare day when associate cricket did not have to fight for airtime. Ireland gave England a major scare, and would have beaten them had they not had the minor inconvenience of their best batsman and bowler playing for England against them. At the same time, Australia decimated Scotland by 200 runs.
The contrast between the two associates was even greater off the pitch. ‘That day highlighted the journey that the two organisations had been on in the last five or six years,’ a Cricket Scotland employee said. ‘It was a real reality check as to where they are and where we are.’
Ireland recognised their game as a chance to show off Irish cricket to the world. The Village in Malahide – which has no permanent stands and the feel of an idyllic out-ground – was turned into a ground capable of seating 10,000 spectators for the ODI against England. It represented a monumental gamble – 8,500 tickets had to be sold just to break even – but one that Ireland needed to take to highlight its appetite for international cricket. Thanks to a sterling marketing campaign and a sumptuous day, only “sold out” signs greeted latecomers.
In comparison, The Grange was deeply underwhelming. Like The Village, The Grange is a picturesque club ground. It is flanked by trees and the club’s tennis courts – even international cricket has to compete with other attractions at this private members’ club.
Scotland risked nothing on the game against Australia, and gained even less: 3,000 spectators came to see the side get mauled and little was done to present Scotland as desperate for more showpiece international fixtures. ‘Malahide was a great customer experience. A lot of money had been spent on getting it to the right level – it would have been a great day for Irish cricket,’ the Cricket Scotland employee told me. ‘When you look at how much effort had been put into the customer experience of the Scotland–Australia game, it wasn’t of the same quality.’
When Scotland played England in May 2014 at Aberdeen, they did so in front of a crowd of 3,000 – fewer than half the 7,000 who saw the first ODI between the two nations in 2008. While attendances surged in Ireland, they stagnated in Scotland; the discrepancy cannot be exclusively attributed to on-field performances. It also reflects the caution of Cricket Scotland; its fear of being overambitious in the number of tickets it could sell for a marquee match and making a loss. All this is easy to criticise but associate finances are unforgiving. ‘They were very conservative, very afraid of losing money,’ said the Scottish cricket journalist Jon Coates. ‘You can’t afford to gamble the game’s future on the possibility of there being a bigger audience out there.’
The weather provides a further complication: Cricket Scotland needed to insure the biggest matches to prevent losses. A sell-out ODI against Australia in 2005 and an ODI between India and Pakistan in 2007, which promised to be a lucrative way for Scotland to tap into the Asian community, were both abandoned without a ball being bowled. In 2012, Scotland’s ODI against England was cancelled three weeks in advance due to the flooding of The Grange.
The caution in Scottish thinking was embodied by the decision to try and remain a part of the English county game even after Ireland left in 2009, complaining that the 40-over one-day cricket on offer did not replicate the 50-over cricket played at ODI level. Scotland only left county cricket in 2013 after being forced out by the ECB’s restructuring. Few lamented their departure: in their last season, Scotland lost all 11 completed matches. Damningly, the Netherlands were far more successful in county cricket despite a much smaller pool of players.
There remains the sense that Cricket Scotland could have done more to promote the national side as a vibrant and commercially attractive cricketing force. Coates asserted, ‘There hasn’t been enough done to cultivate a real culture of following Scotland.’ This is even detectable on social media: as of October 2014, Cricket Ireland had 30,000 Twitter followers to Cricket Scotland’s 12,000.
Nor have they matched Ireland in making a persuasive case for greater opportunities at ODI level. ‘The Scottish cricketing public should be disappointed at how Scotland have articulated and pushed,’ the Cricket Scotland employee reflected.
Insiders have also noted the close friendship between Keith Oliver, Cricket Scotland’s chairman, and Giles Clarke, the chairman of the ECB. Clarke sits on the sport nominations committee for the distribution of honours and, in January 2014, Oliver was awarded an OBE as a reward for the progress of Cricket Scotland in the 12 years since he was appointed chairman. This happened just as Clarke was finalising his plans to spearhead the Big Three’s takeover of the ICC.
Ireland’s rise should not obscure the significant strides made by cricket in Scotland. There are around 60,000 active cricketers in Scotland today, 15,000 more than in Ireland. In 2006, Cricket Scotland’s annual revenue was under £800,000; today, it is £2.1m. The increase has funded the professionalisation of the sport. As recently as 2013, Drummond, who juggled international cricket with his commitments as a development officer for Cricket Scotland, led the side. He is in no doubt that playing full-time would have improved his game. ‘I feel 100 per cent that if I’d had more access to training of the right kind and more opportunities to develop my skills I would have become a better cricketer.’
It seems inconceivable that a part-time cricketer will ever again captain Scotland. In 2014, ten Scottish players had county contracts. Cricket Scotland introduced full-time contracts in 2008 and today awards eight full-time professional contracts and three contracts to younger players. ‘The excuse of being an amateur cricketer no longer exists,’ Roddy Smith said. Yet the sums awarded remain very modest: the top contract is only worth £30,000 a year. ‘The players are the assets of the organisation,’ a current Scotland cricketer complained.
‘The top players should be paid close to what the CEO, head coach, and technical director get,’ Watson reflected. ‘Scotland are in limbo where they are going into this professional phase and not being rewarded hugely for it. Guys are almost having to make more sacrifices now, even though they are getting paid.’
Having captained Scotland while working for Caledonian Breweries (who later employed Hamilton), Watson rejected the offer of a professional contract in 2009 because of the cost of his young family. ‘My earning capacity would have gone down a whole heap. I just took a stance purely based on finance.’
Cricket Scotland’s focus has not merely been on improving its best players. While challenges mirror those in England – a lack of cricket on free-to-air TV and in state schools – significant steps have been undertaken to create a sustained culture of the sport. In 2012, Scotland won the ICC’s Best Overall Cricket Development Programme award. Cricket has even been taken to schools in the Shetland Islands, where there is a league during summer and an indoor competition every winter.
In 2010, Cricket Scotland launched an Interprovincial competition featuring two Scottish sides and two from the Netherlands. The intention was to bridge the gap between Scottish club cricket and international cricket. Initially the competition only featured one-day and Twenty20 cricket, but multi-day cricket was introduced between the Scottish sides in 2013. It was taken out of the schedule the following year. As three-day cricket is an integral part of Ireland’s Interprovincial structure, it does not speak highly of Cricket Scotland’s ambitions to achieve Test status in the foreseeable future.
While Ireland would like fewer of their players to be contracted to counties, Scotland take the opposite view. ‘We are happy, glad and trying as best we can to feed players into the county system,’ Smith, the former chief executive of Cricket Scotland, said. ‘We’re a long way off from being able to match the amount of money that players can earn down south.’
And Scotland are less vexed than Ireland about the prospect of future stars declaring for England. ‘If a Scotland player ended up playing for England, then well done him for being that good,’ Smith told me in September 2014. ‘We’d be delighted if someone got to that level and played at the highest level possible that they can.’
One rather more encouraging change came in 2014 with the announcement that Stirling would become the new centre of Scottish cricket. ‘We’ve suffered because we’ve been trying to deliver professional sport and professional athletes with amateur facilities,’ Smith admitted. The development at Stirling represents a statement of intent by Scotland: a sign to the cricketing world that they should take Scotland seriously, because they are taking themselves seriously. That has perhaps not always been true.
As important as all of these steps are, they fall short of what is really needed to transform Scottish cricket: on-field success. ‘What Ireland have managed to do which we haven’t is to win games consistently at international level. They have qualified consistently for world events which we haven’t. That’s the one big difference,’ Smith observed.
Scotland have never enjoyed a totemic victory to rival those enjoyed by Ireland against Pakistan in the 2007 World Cup or England four years later. They have only ever beaten one full member. No one would ever release a DVD in homage to Scotland’s triumph over Bangladesh in a Twenty20 international in Holland in 2012; bad news for Richie Berrington, who scored a round 100 that day.
The underlying lack of self-belief in Scottish cricket was highlighted by a change in player eligibility rules two years ago, which allowed the selectors to pick players with Scottish parentage. This still puts Scotland at a disadvantage compared to other countries – Ireland were able to select Tim Murtagh based upon his grandparents’ birthplace – but has opened up new talent to the Scottish selectors. Hamish Gardiner, Matt Machan, Rob Taylor and Ian Wardlaw, four crucial current players, have all benefited from the rule.
More controversially, so did Neil Carter. A fine player for Warwickshire in his day, Carter was a retired 38-year-old county cricketer living in South Africa when he made his Scotland debut. The impression created was of Scotland being overly desperate to ship in new talent, distrustful of players who had come up through their own structure and leagues. One former player told Herald Scotland that he was ‘disgusted’ at Carter’s inclusion. ‘This sends out all the wrong signals to the guys who work their backsides off in Scotland. I’ve nothing against Neil Carter, but he is nowhere near the player he used to be and is nearly finished with cricket. So why are the Scots going with him?’
After the eligibility change, Cricket Scotland wrote to almost every county player, including Ireland’s skipper Will Porterfield and his opening partner Paul Stirling, to ask if they had any Scottish blood and if they wanted the chance to play for Scotland in the World Cup. The contrast with Ireland was unflattering. Despite his outstanding county pedigree, Murtagh had to wait a year to become an Ireland regular after qualifying in order to prove his enduring commitment.
Dougie Brown sympathised with the Scottish selectors – as long as they were committed to bringing through local talent. ‘You’ve got to make sure you put your best team on the park. Whether that’s somebody who was born and bred in Scotland or whether that was somebody who is South African who has Scottish roots, if you’re wanting to win that doesn’t matter. Long term it does matter because you want to make sure that you are bringing through your best young players to senior teams.’
Despite sources of encouragement, Scottish cricket felt threatened with irrelevance as 2014 approached. Scotland had failed to qualify for the 2011 World Cup and the previous three World Twenty20s. Former England Test player Paul Collingwood, who had been drafted as assistant coach, offered a withering assessment of why Scotland were not among the six associate qualifiers from the World Twenty20 qualifier in November 2013, ‘There were moments when, I’ll be honest, I thought, “These guys can’t take the heat.”’ He later reflected on ‘a lack of belief’ in the squad, and said, ‘As a general approach, they needed to put the opposition under pressure. Sometimes I felt that they were putting themselves under pressure.’
There were only t
wo further World Cup places at stake in the 2015 World Cup qualifier, held in New Zealand in January 2014. It did not look like Scotland would be among them: they lost their first game, to Hong Kong, and were left needing to win six consecutive matches to make the World Cup. No one gave them much hope.
Yet Scotland played as if liberated by their multifarious failures. ‘The players just embraced the fact they hadn’t played well enough,’ Craig Wright, who was working alongside Collingwood, told me. ‘They realised that a lot of their careers and professional contracts were on the line had we not been successful in that tournament. They realised the wider implications for Scottish cricket and they embraced the challenge.’ After the defeat to Hong Kong, the Scotland side, shell-shocked, had a few drinks together. They agreed that their performances had not been adequate and vowed to avoid self-pitying.
It was Calum MacLeod who exemplified their new approach. His personal turnaround was as stirring as his country’s. In 2008, just after his 19th birthday, MacLeod was signed by Warwickshire as a quick bowler. But, already, trouble was brewing. ‘I developed some bad habits in my bowling action and never really rectified them or did the correct technical work. So I ended up throwing, for want of a better word. I’d rather someone had the difficult conversation earlier when the habits were starting to form because they would have been able to rectify them.’
In July 2009 umpires reported MacLeod’s action after an Intercontinental Cup match. A year of remedial work, including with Warwickshire bowling coach Allan Donald, followed, but MacLeod was not much use to his county. He was released at the end of 2010. For a man who batted at nine or ten for Scotland, it threatened to be terminal for his career. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure what direction I was going to go in. I didn’t know whether to give the game up and try something else or go and play hockey.’