Rugby Union: SRU chief defends Hugh Blake selection

Scottish Rugby Union chief executive Mark Dodson has defended Vern Cotter's decision to include Hugh Blake in his Six Nations squad.

The former New Zealand U20s back-row only moved to Edinburgh last month and has yet to even feature for the capital club.

The 22-year-old has been included at the expense of former national skipper Kelly Brown and Scarlets flanker John Barclay.

Retired Scotland international Andy Nicol and Peter Wright criticised the hurried inclusion of Blake, claiming it was not fair on the nation's juniors, but Dodson has no such reservations.

He said: "I don't think it is sending the wrong message out to our youngsters. It might have done had we not capped so many young Scottish players over the last two years.

"Hamish Watson is in the squad, so is Sam Hidalgo-Clyne and Ben Toolis. It is not as if we've brought Hugh Blake in and no-one else is getting capped.

"People should also not make the assumption that we have not been tracking Hugh Blake. We've been tracking him for ages.

"We had him watched down in New Zealand making sure the progress is there and Vern believes this boy can bring something to the squad that we don't have. He has a special skill set that we don't possess.

"I don’t think we can be in a position where if people go abroad we can afford not to pick them. I see this is a global market. We’re happy to see people come back and we are happy to see people leave, but we have to make sure that the people in our pro squads in Scotland are as competitive as they can be."

Former newspaper advertising chief Dodson caused a stir three years ago when he set out a list of ambitious targets for the SRU - including a World Cup win in 2015. He stands by those targets

"I said before our aim is to win the World Cup and I don't walk away from that," he said. "What I mean is that we have got to get this tanker pointing in the right direction. When I first came the expectation was so low, that people did not think we had the wherewithal to win anything.

"They all said we couldn't pay down debt, we couldn't attract top coaches, that we couldn't get our pro teams in a decent place, we couldn't sell the naming rights for the stadium and we will never get blue-chip sponsors.

"Well since I've come in we've got Vern Cotter in as coach, we've got BT to sponsor Murrayfield, we've paid more debt down than we've ever done before. If we don't, but improve as a nation, then we are moving in the right direction and that was what it was all about."

Scotland's performances in last year's Six Nations were so poor that there were calls from some pundits that the Scots should be made to pre-qualify; Dodson laughs off such suggestions.

"There was a lot of hysteria around last year and justifiably people were upset," he said. "But we had the perfect storm of things that went wrong.

“We had injuries, we had a pitch that for no fault of our own cut up badly and we didn't perform against England, which the Scottish public won't tolerate but things weren't as bad as people portrayed.

"There is always people jumping on the anti-Scotland bandwagon down south especially in a year with an independence vote. It was all ill-informed nonsense. It was all a year after France finished bottom of the Six Nations and I didn't see a clamour of people asking them to pre-qualify."