As far as his appointment goes, it feels like our equivalent of an Alan Solomons at Edinburgh. Someone to steady the ship and placate fans with attacking rugby, but who has shortcomings defensively and not a glowing track record (not horrendous, just average), so I’ll be surprised if we start threatening to be strong playoff contenders under his lead. But a year out from the WC you can’t ask for much more when the decision to boot Wilson was made. He’s got a healthy amount of HC experience, including international rugby, a lot of experience working in union owned setups, as Benetton and Italy head coach. And still relatively young, not a fossil like Richards who I think did brilliantly to keep Newcastle competitive on a budget, but never got them soaring and both Scottish clubs have had the measure of the Falcons for years now in Europe.
As for that last point, that’s a bit of a reach to call it a strange situation, as though he hasn’t spent years in SA and Italy where the exact same mandate comes through. Every nation and club has player mandates/incentives these days. France has JIFF that means you can ignore french talent as a privately run club, but you will struggle to compete as a result for neglecting french talent, so you don’t want a coach who’s just going to prioritise assembling a galáctico squad and let the domestic talent hang. Premiership too has cap incentives to develop and contract English players, meaning more bang for your buck on English players freeing up more of the cap to spend elsewhere if needed. All coaches have control over their squads, they’re just asked to develop young Scottish talents in addition to whomever they want to bring in, not unlike literally every other team. Irish sides are even stricter than us. 3 NIQ players max, the rest must be Irish qualified. I don’t think that’s strange at all, it’s normal and healthy for our national game to prioritise that.
I’d rather have that than allow the new coach to just sign whomever he wants and totally reshape a club’s identity when it also serves a national team purpose.
As far as the assistants go, those guys already have contracts that were made before Smith came in, so if he wants changes, he’s got to prove why he needs them but it’s akin to the player development, SRU has coaching development needs to be met so you can’t just cut out all the Scottish coaches. But Smith and Horne does bode interesting times ahead for Glasgow’s attack, as that’s their bread and butter and Horne is ready to learn and be the Mike Blair figure as skills coach learning from an experienced attack coach. My main concern is no forwards coach officially on our roster, so I’m expecting another appointment if this season doesn’t work out as we’d hope.
