Foreign policy: Mark Dodson on improving Scottish Rugby By Iain Morrison Published on Sunday 27 May 2012 03:29 We're using pro clubs to give overseas talent Scotland "opportunity," admits SRU chief The SRU chief executive Mark Dodson is being posed for a photograph when the snapper suddenly shouts at him to move and look sharp about it. He does so just as a sprinkler showers the area of Murrayfield he was occupying two moments earlier. He's a lucky fella and not just when avoiding a sprinkler because Dodson dodged a bullet this spring. In his opening season with his hand on Murrayfield's tiller, the national team crashed out of the World Cup at the pool stages for the first time in history and that was followed by a Six Nations whitewash. If it wasn't for the performance of Glasgow in the league and Edinburgh in Europe, the poor man would now be viewed like a skunk in a sauna and he doesn't entirely disagree. If you're looking in playing terms you have to be disappointed about the World Cup performance and you have to be disappointed by our Six Nations performance and then you look at the delivery from the pro teams and it balances things up. Because we put such a strong emphasis when I joined the business on putting the pro teams at the heart of what we do here I was delighted by the fact that they both came through. We should be pleased by it but I don't think we have to be grateful, it's the sort of thing we should start to expect. We really have got to start competing at Heineken Cup level, at the second stages regularly, and that's one of the KPI's (key performance indicators) we set for both pro team coaches. We now expect to be playing at the business end of the season in the most important competitions. I haven't put all this money behind the clubs just to bump along the bottom. And he has been spending lots of money, if you look at the long list of foreign players being parachuted into the Scottish pro teams. Izak van der Westhuizen was Edinburgh's ninth new signing and the second South African, alongside prop WP Nel, whose three-year contract would, conveniently, qualify him to play for Scotland just before the 2015 Rugby World Cup. In a move that is either candid or crazy the SRU's chief executive admits that Scotland's recruitment drive is being extended beyond the traditional "kilted Kiwis" and "Auchtermuchty Aussies" to include anyone who might be willing to serve the cause at international level after serving the statutory three-year residency requirement, but he does so only after making all the right noises about developing domestic talent. "We have a very small player pool, we are a small country and as the rugby community gets bigger and bigger we are becoming a smaller and smaller country in terms of (relative) population," says Murrayfield's Mancunian. What we have to do is try to develop as many players from Scotland as we can and we also look at the wider diaspora to try to bring people in who are Scottish qualified to give us that strength in depth. What we can't do is wait for the next generation. We do not have a conveyor belt of talent just waiting for the next player to fall off the end it, we have spurts and it's great that we have a group of players all coming through at once. We have the opportunity here to lay the foundations of a side, which you don't get very often. Wales have just done it. We need to build on that. But, when you look at players who are Scottish qualified from all over the world, then you realise that there is a bigger game to be played and, in real terms, everyone is further ahead than we are. When you talk about the influx of foreign players then everybody has been doing it for a large number of years. We did it ourselves with people like Brendan Laney and Sean Lineen in Scotland. All we are doing is revisiting that, planning it more deeply and looking at the strategy and making sure that we can find people in England, in South Africa, in New Zealand and Australia, wherever we can find Scottish players and giving them the opportunity. We are not forcing them, we're not driving them, we're not encouraging or bribing them, we are saying there is an opportunity here. We're not saying we're going to pick you but there is an opportunity there to naturalise. The IRB (International Rugby Board) set the rules for these things, what we are doing is playing to the same rule book that everybody else is. To avoid any confusion I ask Dodson if he is talking about players who are not currently qualified to play for Scotland coming in and gaining eligibility on the three-year residency rule and the answer is affirmative. In other words the likes of Nel won't be the last foreign player to use Scotland as a stepping stone to the international arena. The Scottish pro teams already sign players with no Scottish connection and an official spokesman pointed out that Sean Lineen, who heads up player recruitment, has yet to get his feet under the table, let alone make any recommendations. But to go public with the idea is sure to kick up a storm. It was a divisive issue when the foreigners were Scottish qualified, like brothers Martin and John Leslie, and Glenn Metcalfe, but to admit that the SRU has a policy of importing and qualifying foreigners with no Scottish connection whatsoever will be anathema to some. The argument that "everyone does it" is undoubtedly true of New Zealand and Australia, who fight for the best Pacific Islanders through school scholarships, but overt recruitment of foreigners is less obvious in Europe. The Welsh regions need the WRU's approval for any foreign signing and they have been known to get it by arguing that the player in question wants to throw his lot in with Wales. The Ospreys" South African winger Hanno Dirksen will become eligible in 2014 but No.8 Toby Faletau simply followed his Tongan father Kuli to Wales as a seven-year-old child. Across the border in England the Aviva Premiership has, unwittingly, taken on the task of attracting and qualifying foreign players for England so the RFU doesn't have to. Only in Ireland is the subject openly aired because each province is allowed four foreigners plus a "project," which refers to an overseas player who could turn out for Ireland in the future. Australian Nathan Hines is a poster boy for Dodson's policy. He qualified for Scotland through residency and no one questioned his commitment to the blue jersey in a career encompassing 77 caps but he was not specifically targeted and recruited. Nor was the Dutchman Tim Visser (below) or maybe, with the benefit of hindsight, he was? You may admire Dodson for his honesty in admitting what many have suspected and much of the fault lies with the IRB whose three-year residency rule is in need of review, especially after cricket recently extended theirs to four or seven years, depending on circumstances. It will provoke heated debate but the man charged with finding foreign recruits is used to that. Lineen stepped aside as Glasgow coach at season's end to make way for Gregor Townsend... or so we thought. According to Dodson it was the other way around. "What we talked about was the strategic things we needed to do to get Scottish rugby right and one of them was that we needed someone in a senior position at the centre of Scottish rugby looking for the global acquisition of players and the development of players down the line," says the boss. That's where we started from. When we looked at that it was clear that Sean Lineen had all the attributes. So it started with Sean in the new role, not with Gregor in the Glasgow role. People sometimes miss that step out... They can make the most impact on Scottish rugby by being in the positions that we have just promoted them to. We've turned this place (Murrayfield) around in a few months in terms of its philosophy, its culture, its openness, its transparency. I know that we get criticised for things like SRU interference, for things like Sean, but that's my job. Murrayfield has had such a poor press over the last ten years or so everything the SRU does is seen to be dim and it isn't dim a lot of the time.