HAVING now read the report by Sir Bill Gammell and Norman Murray into the governance and business of the Scottish Rugby Union, my overwhelming conclusion is that this report is a businessmen’s approach to a business problem.

You may say “Isn’t that what was needed?” and certainly some of the recommendations make a lot of sense from a businessman’s point of view. They see the problem as the tail – those elected by the clubs – wagging the dog, namely the cash-earning activities centred on Murrayfield.

Take out the council and the owning trust, streamline decision-making and let the Murrayfield moguls get on with things. Elected people near the top? Apart from the president, forget it. There are far too many “appointed” rather than “elected” posts in the proposed set-up. That’s the review in a nutshell.

READ MORE: A chance to grow and safeguard our place in global game

There is, however, an absolutely huge matter which Gammell-Murray ignores. The single most important issue which the Gammell-Murray report does not even tackle is the SRU’s ownership of the country’s two fully professional clubs and its control of the Super 6 semi-professional clubs.

The duo may argue that they were not tasked with doing so, but they should have. After all, the review was of the governance and business of the union and by a country mile, the business of the SRU other than the national teams is the professional game.

Imagine, if you will, the Scottish Football Association being the owners of Celtic and Rangers. There are plenty of people who think it’s been the other way around for decades, but the SFA still makes some pretence at being a governing body.

If the SFA did indeed own Celtic and Rangers, you can imagine the outcry if they were given favoured status and more cash than the rest of Scotland’s football clubs.

Yet that is precisely what the SRU does in its control of Glasgow Warriors and Edinburgh Rugby. And believe me, the Murrayfield moguls exert an unhealthy level of control over the two clubs, not least because they ultimately choose the coaches, pay the wages and use Edinburgh and Glasgow to supply the bulk of the national squad.

You may recall over the past years all sorts of promises and schemes for direct outside investment into Scottish Rugby, specifically the two professional clubs. One of the first conclusions of Gammell-Murray is this: “The growing professionalism of the modern game now provides vastly increased potential for external investment to further develop the sport in Scotland.”

So where has that investment taken place in the Warriors and Edinburgh Rugby? I am reliably informed that potential suitors took one look at the proposed ownership model and ran a mile because the SRU would still be basically calling the shots. The only man that tried such investment in the past, Bob Carruthers, went away with a badly burned tail between his legs precisely because Murrayfield kept interfering – he told me so at the time.

READ MORE: Darryl Marfo leaves Edinburgh Rugby - just one of these things says assistant coach Stevie Lawrie

The two pro clubs and the Super 6 are simply not on the table for discussion as the SRU wants to retain control of them. It is simply ludicrous, however, to expect sane business people to put money into the professional game and cede control to the governing body.

Gammell may say that no investor told him what he had to do when he was turning Cairn Energy from a £10 million-valued company to one with a valuation of £10 billion, but that’s not the point – Cairn Energy was a business, not a governing body trying to act like a business.

Think of Dermot Desmond and Dave King pumping their money into Celtic and Rangers and then being told by President Rod Petrie that the SFA would pick their coaches and decide on salaries and you can see how ludicrous those external investment ambitions were.

Gammell-Murray proposes a new governance structure which does not solve the SRU’s problems but exacerbates them because it does not address fundamental issues such as whether a governing body should be able to put resources into eight clubs at the expense of more than a hundred others. I’d go further – I understand the SRU had to step in when the game went open in 1995, but should it be involved in owning and running clubs at all?

Careful manipulation of the figures has allowed the pretence that the grassroots level of Scottish rugby is healthier than it was, but everyone involved in the game a knows that while it is not moribund just yet, it is suffering from a seemingly permanent lurgy. That’s where the cash and SRU support must go.

The Scottish rugby fans – the one sector that never gets consulted – want to see success on the pitch, and there has been some. Certainly, the SRU is at least more professional than the days of the blazerati. But by retaining so much control over the pro and semi-pro clubs, the SRU is killing external investment, not attracting it.

By not even addressing this issue, the SRU is saying that Murrayfield will retain control – we are the dog and the tail can go hang itself. Meanwhile, the grassroots wither on the vine for lack of fertilisation.