The best, most richly gifted fly-half in Scotland has been dropped; he and his coaches disagree about his role and the way the team ought to play; he is feeling “claustrophobic and angry” and is desperate to get back to his club in France. Right now Gregor Townsend has likely got other things on his mind, but maybe somewhere among it he is thinking if history does not repeat, it rhymes. Because all that was 22 years ago, when he was the player who had been dropped, replaced by Duncan Hodge, and he was arguing with the backs coach John Rutherford. This time around, Townsend is the coach, and Finn Russell is the player on the out.
The comparison is not exact. Russell was cut because of that “breach of team protocol”, the Scottish Rugby Union’s polite euphemism for a drinking jag and going awol from training the next day. Townsend works closely with the organisational psychologist Damian Hughes, who wrote a book on the “Barcelona way”. Hughes is a great believer in what he calls “trademark behaviours”. You do not need to be a devotee of Hughes’s brand of “liquid thinking” to appreciate that skipping training is not one of them.
But that was a while back already, and does not explain why Russell is still not being considered for selection. “We will look at things next week” Townsend said on Thursday. The word is he is still waiting for a proper apology. In the background of all this is the row between Russell’s father, Keith, and the SRU. He was the director of domestic rugby until he was sacked in 2017. He sued them for unfair dismissal and won a six-figure settlement in an employment tribunal. The fallout did not reflect well on the SRU’s chief executive Mark Dodson. Russell said the culture within the organisation was “toxic” and that the case put his son “in a really awkward position”. They are a close family.
“He’s very aware of how the SRU has treated myself and so it’s made it really difficult for him this year to go out, whether it’s Glasgow at Scotstoun or Scotland at Murrayfield, knowing there are people in the stand who have just summarily dismissed his father with no justification, with no process or anything else,” Keith said at the time.
Keith’s wife, Sally, told the Offside Line “it used to be like a dream” to watch her boy playing for Scotland, but that “now it is for ever tainted.”
When Russell decided to move to Racing 92, Dodson said the SRU could not compete with the “superstar money” on offer in France. Keith Russell claimed they had not tried, because they never made Finn an offer to stay. Dodson meanwhile, had his salary doubled.
Townsend has been around Scottish rugby long enough to have lived through similar rows, and he might have found a way round all this. But at the same time his relationship with Russell appears to have broken down. Scott Hastings described it on Sky this week as a “clash of personalities”. It first blew up at Twickenham last year, during Scotland’s 38-38 draw with England. They had been cut to pieces in that first half, but in the second Russell sparked an astonishing comeback. He set up two tries and scored a third himself.
It was one of the great displays of spontaneous attacking rugby, of a kind Russell does better than almost any other player around. And it grew out of a row with Townsend. “I actually had an argument with Gregor,” Russell told ITV after the match. “I said to him: ‘You’re telling us to kick and when we kick, they just run it back and cut us open, and when we run it, they’re just hitting us behind the gain line and winning the ball back.’ Second half, we just came out with nothing to lose, played our rugby, kicked out of our half and scored some great tries. We played good Scottish rugby.”
Gordon Reid, playing prop, relived it in an interview with the BBC this week. “Finn and Gregor just kind of having a big domestic. It was more about tactics. I think we kicked a lot in the first half, it didn’t really work and we needed to change it. Gregor wasn’t really happy. You’ve got some people who say things just to be heard, for their voice to be recognised. But when Finn says something, he’s saying it for a reason. You’ve got one guy who’s out on the park getting eaten up and spat back out. Then you’ve got another who’s just angry. These two guys come head-to-head.”
A year later, it feels as if Scotland are still trying to figure out exactly what “good Scottish rugby” looks like, but it seems pretty clear that Townsend and Russell do not always agree on it. The hectic, high-tempo, approach they have used in the last two years came up short at the World Cup, and Townsend and his new captain, Stuart Hogg, are trying to develop a cannier, more cautious style.
Hogg made some telling comments at the Six Nations launch, when he was asked if Scotland needed to work on their game management. No one mentioned Russell. Until he did: “When you’ve got a guy like Finn Russell at 10 who just wants to chuck the pill about the paddock all the time, you’ve got to rein him in every now and then,” Hogg said.
“We can’t score points in our own half unless it’s massively on for us to chuck the ball about, and for us now it’s about when to play and when to kick.” There are echoes here of the rows Townsend used to have with his coach Jim Telfer, only this time he is on the other side of the argument.
Russell, who was part of Scotland’s senior players group, has stayed in touch with the talented young fly-half who has replaced him, Adam Hastings, and they spoke on the Friday night before the Ireland game. It seems his relations with Townsend, though, still have a way to go. England at least, will be grateful. “He’s a world-class player,” Eddie Jones said the last time England came up to Murrayfield, when Russell orchestrated a 25-13 win, and one they will be happy they do not have to face on Saturday.