Latest news with #ScottishRugbyUnion
Daily Record
an hour ago
- Business
- Daily Record
Ayr rugby chiefs lodge fresh plans as they seek approval for phase three Millbrae redevelopment
Rugby chiefs now hope to get the green light so they can plough ahead with the latest stage of the club's transformation. Top brass at Ayr Rugby Club have lodged fresh proposals for the multi-million pound redevelopment of their home at Millbrae. With work now complete on phases one and two of the ambitious project, rugby chiefs now hope to get the green light so they can plough ahead with the latest stage of the club's transformation. Phase one involved improved access to Millbrae, while phase two involved the installation of an all-weather pitch. Now phase three involves the refurbishment of the Millbrae clubhouse. Agents in this latest proposal are Jewitt & Wilkie Architects and central to the plan is the building of a new strength and conditioning gym. Also included in the design plans are a golf simulator room, club merchandise shop, multi-use rooms and more. General internal and external alterations to the Millbrae clubhouse are also being proposed in order to make the club's base one of the most modern around. The design and access statement said: 'Ayr Rugby Football Club (ARFC) propose to carry out an extensive Clubhouse refurbishment as part of a third phase in their redevelopment of Millbrae. 'Planning approvals have been granted by South Ayrshire Council for a new access road (Phase 1) and an all-weather pitch (Phase 2) and this application marks the third phase of the Club's redevelopment, which was made possible through the £3m Macdonald Legacy Award.' The statement continues: 'A third planning application (Phase 3) was submitted to South Ayrshire Council on 5th August 2024, which proposed internal and external changes, with a Strength and Conditioning Gym and Café extension to the north of the Clubhouse. 'This application was withdrawn due to the club's strategy to provide 'sports-based facilities' based upon detailed studies of alternative locations for new facilities to derive the optimum solution for the available funds. Much of the internal Clubhouse refurbishment remains the same in this submission.' The works involve the following: • Gym Extension to meet Sportscotland and Scottish Rugby Union criteria for strength and conditioning. The gym will also serve as a daytime 'leisure' provision to the local community and to provide valuable income and activity within the Club. • Upgrading and increase in capacity of male, female and accessible toilet (baby changing) facilities. • 'Clean' and 'Dirty' changing facilities for the new all-weather and existing grass pitches to meet Sportscotland and Scottish Rugby Union requirements for male, female, disabled and gender-neutral users. • New referees' changing for male and female match officials. • Refurbishment and internal alteration of bar, lounge and functions area, with associated works to the kitchen area. • Upgrading of the thermal fabric of the Clubhouse including the installation of energy efficient heating, lighting, ventilation and foul/surface water management systems. • New PV panels and low carbon heating installations. The proposals represent an overall increase in area of the existing Clubhouse of 288sqm. The design statement adds: 'The Clubhouse extension, refurbishment and external works serve to create a contemporary environment to reflect Ayr RFC's established achievements and ambitions, however, to respect the Club's rich history and tradition. 'The upgrading and extension will create a sporting complex to support an even greater community and commercial involvement and to provide facilities that met, or exceeded the standards required by the Scottish Rugby Union and Sportscotland. 'In addition to the support of existing uses, the addition of the strength and conditioning gym, club merchandise shop, golf simulator, multi-use spaces and enhanced facilities will increase capacity, participation and provide a facility used all year round and not just within the rugby calendar.' The proposals are listed as 'pending consideration' on South Ayrshire Council's online planning portal and a decision on them is expected around the middle of September.
The Star
10-07-2025
- Sport
- The Star
Rugby-Scotland have eye on World Cup seeding as they ready to face Fiji
FILE PHOTO: Soccer Football - Scottish Premiership - Rangers v Celtic - Ibrox, Glasgow, Scotland, Britain - May 4, 2025 Scottish Rugby Union head coach Gregor Townsend in the stands REUTERS/Russell Cheyne/File Photo SUVA (Reuters) -Scotland are aware that vital World Cup seeding points are up for grabs when they take on Fiji in a test on their Pacific tour, adding to the importance of the contest on Saturday, said coach Gregor Townsend. In the December draw for the 2027 World Cup in Australia, the top six in the World Rugby rankings will earn a seeding in the first round pools for the tournament that has been expanded to 24 teams, making a win vital for seventh-placed Scotland. At the 2023 World Cup, Scotland were unseeded and ended up being paired with Ireland and South Africa in the group stage and failed to get past the first round. "This is a very important game along with next week's test against Samoa and also the tests we have in November to put ourselves in the best possible position to get in that top six," Townsend said at a virtual press conference on Thursday. Scotland are narrowly behind sixth-placed Argentina on points, putting the seeding firmly on players' minds. "That can be a bit of added pressure and that's good. These games are all massive and our approach is to go out and win," added Rory Darge, who captains the side in Suva on Saturday. "It's something we've talked about but we can't really look beyond Fiji in Fiji because that's going to be a massive challenge," he said. Townsend said Scotland's approach on their tour, which started with a hard-fought win over the Maori All Blacks in New Zealand last weekend, was to field two separate teams for the opening two matches. "We'd planned to mix it up which is an element of risk. But what I believe works well for us, and has worked in the past, you get that cohesion with this team that is going out against Fiji, having trained together now for the last two or three weeks," the coach added. (Writing by Mark Gleeson in Cape Town; Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
The Herald Scotland
09-07-2025
- Health
- The Herald Scotland
Steven Naismith makes investment in sports science
Naismith has invested a six-figure sum in ScribePro, a medical app currently used by 11 national associations across football, rugby, and cricket, including the Scottish Football Association and Scottish Rugby Union. It was founded by Jonny Gordon, a consultant in emergency medicine and Scotland Men's A team doctor, and David Lowe, an academic consultant in emergency medicine and co-director of EmQuire Research. Read More: The duo teamed up with healthcare specialists to establish the company after identifying the need to modernise the paper-based systems used for team-managed sports. Naismith will also be an ambassador for the platform, introducing it to clubs and national associations as well as consulting on its future development. Naismith said: 'I've had a good relationship with Jonny for a long time, working with him right through youth and senior levels with the Scotland team and then into management and coaching. The demand on players has never been greater and the margins of winning are finer than they have ever been, which only makes products like ScribePro more important. 'Technology like this can make things better for everyone involved in sport. From my experience as a player – when I had some injury problems myself – I know the process of sharing or even accessing fitness and injury data could be clunky, to say the least. And I'm looking forward to helping develop the platform further, supporting the decisions managers make with players and working with clinicians on recovery programmes and availability. 'More players are beginning to understand they have a short career and, while they might make good money, they retire and still have half their lives ahead of them. In the age of social media there are so many opportunities for players to get involved with, but it's important they get involved with something they believe in.
Telegraph
21-06-2025
- Sport
- Telegraph
Lions and Scotland great ‘Mighty Mouse' Ian McLauchlan dies at 83
Ian McLauchlan, the former Scotland captain, British and Irish Lions prop forward, and distinguished rugby administrator, has died. He was 83. Regarded as one of the most fearsome forwards of his generation, McLauchlan was known best by his nickname 'Mighty Mouse,' because of his ability to dominate opposition props despite being relatively small in stature for the front row. He won 43 caps for Scotland and was captain on 19 occasions, a record then overtaken by another world-class loosehead prop, David Sole. It was his heroics for the Lions that etched his place in rugby folklore. McLauchlan would go on to feature in all eight Test matches for the Lions on their victorious tours to New Zealand in 1971 and South Africa in 1974, one of only five players to do so. His final Scotland appearance was against New Zealand at Murrayfield in November 1979 at the age of 37, a decade after making his debut. After retiring from playing, he went on to serve the game as a highly regarded administrator, serving as president of the Scottish Rugby Union between 2010 to 2012. A strong advocate for the women's game, he also served as a member of the Scottish Rugby Union board from 2010-19 and was a director of European Professional Club Rugby. In 2013, he was inducted to Scottish Rugby's Hall of Fame and in December 2017 he was awarded OBE in the New Year's Honours List. He also served as chair of the British and Irish Lions Trust and was a trustee and chair of Scottish rugby's own charity, the Murrayfield Injured Players Foundation. His contribution to rugby union in total spanned six decades, from winning his first cap for Scotland at Twickenham in 1969 to his last SRU board meeting in 2019. Born in Tarbolton, Ayrshire on 14 April 1942, he was the first former pupil of Ayr Academy and first student of Jordanhill College to be capped for Scotland. Writing in his autobiography, Mighty Mouse, he described how he fell in love with the game despite not coming from a rugby-playing background. 'I loved the physicality, the brutality and the camaraderie of it. Before long the game had become the be-all and end-all of my life,' he wrote. He played his club rugby with Jordanhill and West of Scotland, and was first called up for a Scottish trial in 1963, and he made his debut for Glasgow District in the same season. While it was his scrummaging technique that would make him a feared opponent on the world stage, even against much bigger opponents – he was around 5ft 8ins and weighed just over 14st – he was also famed for his broken-field play and try-scoring prowess. When he eventually made his Scotland debut in 1969, at the age of 27 in the Calcutta Cup match, he had already scored 13 tries in the club game. Within a couple of seasons, he became an ever-present figure in the Scotland team, becoming captain in 1973, famously playing against England just three weeks after breaking his leg in the victory over Ireland, in a bid to win the Triple Crown. As Sandy Carmichael, his front-row colleague once remarked: 'His heart is bigger than his body.' Scotland lost but shared the Five Nations title. McLauchlan taught at Broughton High School in Edinburgh and when he retired from playing had a brief spell in rugby journalism before setting up his own marketing company. His latter years were spent on Islay, on where his wife, Eileen was born. She passed away in 2023. Telegraph Sport columnist Sir Ian McGeechan paid tribute to his former team-mate and captain. 'Mouse was instrumental for a group of us who came into the Scotland team in the early 1970s,' said McGeechan. 'After he came back from the 1971 [Lions] tour of New Zealand, where he had been so instrumental in the rugby and approach that was played against the All Blacks, a group of us, including myself and Andy Irvine, felt the impact of his support. 'When he was appointed captain, the difference in the atmosphere and attitude was incredible, as was the support he gave us. He was a clever rugby player; he had good hands and was PE-trained. He just encouraged us to play in a Scotland jersey, and I really appreciated being captained by him. He told us not to be afraid to play. 'He was just a good person to be with. He had a good sense of humour and was committed to making sure Scotland were playing on the front foot and not being afraid of it. We benefited hugely from having the Mouse as captain. It was the same on the 1974 Lions tour of South Africa with those of us who went on tour for the first time. 'When he became an administrator, he was not afraid to speak his mind. Everyone knew just what he thought. In that way, he was not afraid of challenging things. A man who in his own way was very good for Scottish and Lions rugby.'
Times
15-06-2025
- Business
- Times
Dutch stadium could hold blueprint for Murrayfield's green ambitions
Later this year, as part of the Murrayfield centenary celebrations, the Scottish Rugby Union is expected to put forward wide-ranging plans aimed at transforming both the stadium and its surrounding footprint. The union will hope to harness a mix of private and public funding in an effort to not only bring Scotland's largest venue into the 21st century but also position it as a beacon of customer experience that can drive revenue on far more than a handful of international match days each year. For a shining example of the power of collaborative working, and how placing sustainability at the heart of its plans could aid the bottom line as well as the planet, the SRU might look to Amsterdam's Johan Cruyff ArenA, a venue constructed in the mid-1990s around the same time that Murrayfield last underwent serious redevelopment. Since then, the public-facing areas at the home of Scottish rugby have received minimal care and investment, whereas the ArenA has become a world-renowned cradle of innovation, most notably with regards to how the football matches, concerts and business events staged there are powered. The stadium, owned by a combination of the local authority, Ajax FC and other private companies, has invested in a state-of-the-art energy storage system that has dramatically reduced reliance on diesel generators for back-up power on event days. Some 4,200 solar panels are arranged on the roof of the stadium, and the green energy captured by these units, in addition to a nearby wind turbine and solar park, is transferred to two 'mega-batteries' located deep in the bowels of a facility that has a sliding capacity of between 56,000 (for football) and 71,000 (for concerts). The first of these mega-batteries was installed in 2018 using 148 new and second-life batteries from Nissan Leaf electric vehicles and remains the largest project of its kind in a European commercial building. Two thirds of the project was funded via a loan from the Amsterdam Climate and Energy Fund, with the remainder coming from private sources. The second battery arrived last year, giving the ArenA a total storage capacity of 8.6 megawatt hours. This is enough to charge 1.7 million phones or provide 20,000 households with electricity for an hour. Last August Ajax's Eredivisie season opener against Heerenveen made history as the first major football match to run entirely on green energy, from the floodlights and concourse lighting to beer taps and refreshment stalls. The ambition is for the ArenA to be putting on net-positive events by 2030. Already, excess energy in the batteries is sold back to the grid. Eaton, the power management giant, was a key player in the original battery project and Fabrice Roudet, its sustainability director, is adamant that the principles of what has been achieved in the Dutch capital are applicable on whatever scale elsewhere. 'A number of stadiums around Europe were built several decades ago and are now grappling with the same questions around how to make their facilities work for the customer, the environment and the business,' he said. 'A stadium can take five years to build, so from the very first day it opens, it's essentially already old from a technology standpoint. And then you have to maintain it over decades, during which you might increase the number of seats, add bars and restaurants and introduce more hospitality facilities. These kinds of changes can make your energy consumption go through the roof and then the conversation about how you power it becomes even more important. 'Not every stadium is going to have two massive batteries like we have in Amsterdam, but every stadium should definitely take into account these kinds of technologies as we all look to significantly reduce the reliance on diesel. 'When you're also able to help the grid, it is well-incentivised, which is a way to have payback on the [original] system. 'The ArenA management saw the value: if you take the example of solar panels, the price of electricity has gone down. But when you look at what happened at the start of the war in Ukraine, the cost to buy from an electricity distributor was much, much higher than the around eight [euro] cents that, over time, it typically costs to produce a kilowatt hour using a big solar system on the roof of a large building. 'At one point, the price of electricity from the grid was five, six, even seven times the cost of your own production. So if you had batteries, your cost of production was increased a little, but it was still really, really worth it financially overall.' The ArenA has also invested heavily in LED lighting, both to aid pitch growth and to improve the performance of the floodlights, which benefits both those in the stadium and, by eliminating flicker in slow-motion replays, the sharpness of the images served to the television audience and VAR. Every step of the way, sustainability meshes with innovation, quite literally in the case of the stadium escalators. The energy generated by people riding down is captured and used to offset the energy required to power the movement of those moving up. A giant biodigester transforms food waste from the stadium and local businesses into green energy, which is then fed back into the stadium itself, while water from the nearby Ouderkerkerplas lake is used to cool the dressing rooms and stadium offices. Rainwater from the stadium roof is collected and reused to water the pitch. Like Murrayfield, the ArenA has diversified into music — Robbie Williams is playing two nights next week, before Imagine Dragons, Stray Kids and Kendrick Lamar take the stage in July — and they report that concert promoters are increasingly using a venue's environmental credentials as a key criterion in their selection process. 'We are seeing that from the general consumer, in this case the match-going fan, as well,' Roudet says. 'People know more about sustainability, what is possible, and what others are doing and so they expect more from businesses and stadiums too.' Other venues are rising to the challenge. The Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, has also gone heavy on solar panels and LEDs, while a stormwater management system grants scope to store more than two million gallons on site and reduce flood risk in the surrounding area. These and other water-efficient features mean the stadium uses 47 per cent less water than baseline industry standards. Back in Europe, the Bluenergy Stadium in Udine, northern Italy, last year installed a smaller-scale version of the ArenA's solar panel/battery combination, while in September 2021 the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium staged the first net-zero football match at elite level, with emissions from a London derby against Chelsea offset into a reforestation project in east Africa and a local tree-planting initiative. This all sounds a far cry from some of the more fundamental challenges that visitors to Murrayfield experience, particularly if they are a woman who does not want to spend hours queueing for the loos or a parent looking to wash their child's hands with hot water after a half-time bathroom break. Nonetheless, they do underscore how customer expectation is changing, and how other venues are responding. The lesson, Roudet believes, is to think both big and longer-term. 'Sustainability can sometimes be a hard sell because with things like batteries and ventilation systems, it's not necessarily visible to the public. But then you think of something like the light show the French rugby federation is able to put on with LEDs at the Stade de France now — that's incredibly visible, it improves the fan experience and over time it consumes much less power. 'What [event] organisers and the public need and want from a venue is changing over time, and the most successful stadiums will be those which anticipate and respond to those changes.'
