FRANCE play Australia today and again next week. They do so without any players from the four clubs who were engaged in last weekend's Top 14 semi-finals.
Meanwhile today's final between Clermont-Auvergne and Toulouse will at last bring down the curtain on the French domestic season. Not before time, some of those taking part will think.
Just over a year ago many were reporting for pre-World Cup tr
aining. In effect they've endured a 12-month season.
The professional game certainly makes demands. But so too does the amateur one. Pre-season training began this week at Philiphaugh, and doubtless at a good many other clubs too, even though it seems only yesterday that Selkirk were playing (and winning) the Border League final.
No doubt the greater emphasis on physical fitness and development, and the intensity of the club game today, are good for Scottish rugby, but one does sometimes wonder about the demands made on players for whom there are necessarily and properly other things in life – families, jobs and studies, for instance.
There are side-effects for other sports too. Not many rugby players – or footballers – can play cricket nowadays.
There are a few exceptions, usually university students. Stuart Moffat, for instance, has played rugby for Scotland and also hit a century for Cambridge in the university match against Oxford.
This season, Brendan McKerchar returned to university when the Border Reivers were disbanded, to play both rugby and cricket for Oxford.
But many others, with a talent at more than one game, must choose to specialise. "What a pity Duncan Hodge can no longer play cricket," Norman Mair once said to me. "He was such a good batsman at school."
Leafing through an old Wisden some months ago, I saw that one M L R Blair headed the Edinburgh Academy bowling averages. We may be happy that in the more familiar guise of Mike Blair he has concentrated on rugby, but it may be cricket's loss.
It couldn't be otherwise, given the demands made by the modern game. We are never going to see all-rounders like the Edwardian hero K G Macleod again.
He won 12 Scottish caps, the matches including a famous 6-0 victory over South Africa, before retiring aged only 21. He won the 100 yards in the Oxford-Cambridge athletics match, played cricket for Cambridge and Lancashire, football for Manchester City and in his forties became the amateur golf champion of Natal.
I don't know if he ever played tennis seriously. Had he done so, I dare say Andy Murray would be bidding to be the second, rather than first, Scottish winner of the Wimbledon men's singles.
Nor are we ever likely to see another Scottish international wing-threequarter win an Olympic gold medal as Eric Liddell did. Specialisation has taken over, and dual internationalists are rarer than white blackbirds.
Yet almost exactly 50 years ago the England opening batsmen against New Zealand, Arthur Milton and Mike (MJK) Smith, came into that category, Milton having played football, and Smith rugby, for England. Admittedly each was capped only once in what was then his winter game . . . but nevertheless.
Still it's pointless for even a sucker for romantic nostalgia to spend time regretting that the world has moved on. There's still plenty of fun in rugby – and the right sort of fun too, not the kind that four English internationals are accused of having got up to on their disastrous tour of New Zealand.
The game isn't all hard work – though it's certainly that too. I'm looking forward to today's French final, hoping that Clermont-Auvergne pull it off, not only because they have reached the final eight times in their previous incarnation as Montferrand, and never yet won it, but because they play with flair and a sense of adventure.
As for the French excursion with a largely unknown team to Australia, that too may be fun if the sentiments of their young winger from Brive, Alexis Pallisson, are anything to go by. "Nobody," he told a reporter, "needs to say to me 'take risks, little one'. It's sometimes necessary to rein me in a bit." That's the authentic spirit of French rugby which Bernard Laporte tried to damp down, but which their new coach Marc Lievremont seems to be encouraging again.
Take risks. A message I commend to Scotland and (with less need) to Selkirk.
If young Pallisson is as good as his word, he may be the next pin-up boy of French rugby, all the more so because his interviewer describes him in terms more likely to be applied to a member of a boy band: "androgynous face, high cheek-bones and almond eyes", adding that "his qualities of speed and ability to create danger have seduced le staff tricolore'."
Not the sort of language often employed by Scottish scribes.
They do things differently in France, as Laurence Sterne remarked some 250 years ago; and all of us who love rugby may be happy that they do.
The full article contains 851 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
