Biggar Rugby Club forging on despite devastating impact of coronavirus

Although club rugby matches remain off the menu due to the pandemic, anticipation is building that a successful vaccine rollout will see games return this summer.

Mike, speaking in the week that Scottish Rugby unveiled a £6.5 million support scheme for grassroots rugby, told the Carluke and Lanark Gazette: “I think there will be some clubs that are strugging with finance, there will be others that are ok at the moment.

"The point at which we believe we’re going to be struggling is if rugby opens back up without spectators.

"So if we’re playing competitive rugby – which we want to do under any circumstances – but we’re playing that competitive rugby without spectators – and therefore it’s difficult to get membership, difficult to get sponsors for that coming year.

"That’s when we’ll start leaking money because we’ll be paying coaches, basically we’ve got a lot of money going out and nothing going in.

"We’ve been all right because whilst we’ve not had a lot of money coming in, we haven’t had a lot of money going out, we’ve managed to cut down on everything.

"The club has used furlough money. I think we took our academy officer off furlough, we made our development officer position redundant because we couldn’t see when we were going to get back into schools and require a development officer again.”

Biggar seniors will resume touch rugby from May 17.

Mike said he was waiting to hear by how much Biggar RFC would benefit from a slice of Scottish Rugby’s £6.5 million fund.

In the package £1.5M is earmarked for immediate club recovery needs and a safe, sustainable Return to Rugby programme. A further £5M will go towards stimulating Growth and Participation over the coming five years.The existing club support payments allocated by Scottish Rugby which amounted to £2.9M in financial year (19/20) will rise to £3M per annum and will be index linked for the next five years.