SCOTLAND 1990 Grand Slam hero Scott Hastings and broadcasting legend Dougie Donnelly are to give speeches at a ‘virtual’ club dinner aimed at raising money for rugby clubs in Scotland affected by the coronavirus outbreak.
The event is being hosted by the Scottish Rugby Blog, a website run by a group of Scottish rugby fans, and will be broadcast live via Facebook on 24th July from 8:30pm.
The group are making the event free for people to attend but will be encouraging anyone who watches to donate the cost of a night out to their local rugby club.
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“We know how difficult it’s been for community clubs in Scotland during the coronavirus outbreak,” said Cammy Black, Deputy Editor of the Blog. “Clubs rely on events like their annual club dinners to raise vital funds and we wanted to do something to help.
“Clubs are the lifeblood of Scottish rugby and it’s important that we do everything we can to make sure they survive to help bring through the next generation of players and fans alike.
“We’re encouraging clubs to set up watch parties and open up virtual bars on the night to give people an opportunity to donate money to help keep them going. My home club, Berwick Rugby Club, did this in the early stages of lockdown by organising a watch party for last season’s national Shield Final and opened up a virtual bar on their website which is still open now”.
Hastings and Donnelly will be joined by a host of other speakers on the night including Scotland international Rhona Lloyd, international referee Hollie Davidson and Squidge Rugby, a popular rugby analyst from YouTube.
“We’re obviously delighted to have Scott and Dougie agree to make speeches,” said Black. “We’re also really pleased to be able to bring in some new voices as well. We really wanted to make sure our speakers represented what club rugby looks like in 2020”.
Details of the event, including how to set up a virtual club bar can be found: HERE
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Excellent Cammy!
Hi James. We’re always on the look out for people to write about club rugby! I can recommend our “Rucktopia” episode of our podcast where Stuart Cameron and I had a long chat about the future of Scottish club rugby. Regular listeners to the pod also regularly have to put up with me mentioning Berwick Rugby Club at least once every episode regardless of what we’re talking about.
I donated directly to my local youth rugby club, why bother with the middlemen, if you want to help just get in touch and send them your help.
Every avenue helps I suppose. In any case the Scottish Rugby Blog appears to be the Scottish Professional Rugby Blog so I suppose it will mainly attract followers of those very few Scottish teams.
Hi Richard. We’re not acting as middle men. We’re asking people to donate direct to their clubs.