Discussions are ongoing regarding shared coverage of the Guinness PRO14 play-offs, but there is a strong possibility that the dulcet tones rugby lovers have become used to, without understanding a word of what is being said, have broadcast on the sport for the last time.

If so it was a fitting ending as Hugh Dan MacLennan commentated on the team that he has taken most enjoyment from reporting on in the 10 years that Gaelic channel BBC Alba has been delivering rugby into Scottish homes.

“It was very entertaining, largely because of Glasgow’s success. That made it much easier to do. It was great fun to be involved in,” he muses, as he reflects on that decade of coverage.

“To be honest it’s been hard work a lot of the time commentating on the Edinburgh matches. They have come so close to tipping points, but we have had to commentate on them taking a pounding in a lot of games, some of it largely self-inflicted, which is never easy.

“So that’s been a huge challenge, but I think the Glasgow roll from Firhill onwards and upwards has been something you couldn’t fail to be impressed by and they have produced so many fantastic performances that it’s very difficult to have any selections in a top five or a top 10 of favourite matches that doesn’t involve them.”

At first glance the marriage seemed a strange one since there is traditionally very little cross-over between rugby and the Gaelic speaking community, but as MacLennan points out, it was mutually beneficial at a time when domestic rugby could not attract broadcast interest and BBC Alba was looking to grow its audience beyond its natural constituency.

“It’s probably been one of the most fulfilling parts of my broadcasting career personally, but I do think as a challenge the team that got stuck into delivering it at very short notice did a good job over the piece and that’s been evidenced in the kind of reaction we’ve had to the realisation that we won’t be doing it anymore,” he observes.

“I think people now realise two things; that if we hadn’t done it they wouldn’t have got any coverage and once we did it they realised we could do it and that we could engage with people.

“It was partly fortuitous, but largely due to the vision Alan Esslemont [then head of content at BBC Alba] had of where the channel needed to be, because they were set very high audience figures which were unachievable from the normal Gaelic audience. You’re talking 500,000 viewers a month… well we’ve only got 100,000 Gaelic speakers, so we had to find people from elsewhere.”

Initially there was some resistance on either side, rugby lovers naturally having trouble with commentary they could not understand, not least when a similar arrangement on the equivalent channel in Wales saw the red button being used to provide an alternative in English, while there were bound to be some Gaels who saw this as being a sport in which they had little interest, taking up valuable air time.

“There was certainly some of both those things, but I think the biggest issue for the Gaelic audience was the balance of the Gaelic/English ratio rather than the niceties of whether rugby was a sport we should be doing or not,” MacLennan acknowledges. 

 “Part of it was that this was a sport that wasn’t a sport that was closely associated with the Gaelic community and convincing everybody in the rugby fraternity that the Gaelic people, if I can put it that way, could do it. There were all sorts of perceptions flying about that maybe we weren’t mainstream broadcasters.

“It took a little while to convince people of that, but once we got on air I think people realised we were doing it slightly differently – the half-time features and all that which we developed, began to appeal to people – but there was a simple challenge because it’s not an indigenous Highland sport, the vocabulary issues, the positions and all that stuff.

“Obviously when doing shinty and football we never had to do that because we had the vocabulary, so there was a separate challenge which, if you overcome it, leads to job satisfaction and that’s an on-going process all along.”

As we spoke some hope remained that fellow broadcasters Sky may see value in sharing the right to broadcast the play-offs in which Glasgow Warriors have booked their place and may do so for Edinburgh tonight if they can deny Ulster a full five points when they meet their neighbours’ Conference rivals in Belfast, but MacLennan would not be the blue-blooded native Scot that he is if he did not instinctively fear the worst in that regard. 

“We haven’t been given any indication regarding the play-offs,” he says. “As far as we’re concerned we have probably done our last transmissions from the competition. It’s not a definite ‘no’ in that there has been a suggestion that there might be a possibility, but it’s all very tenuous and dependent on Glasgow and Edinburgh proceeding.”

Given the requirements involved, not least in developing the necessary vocabulary, it was the great good fortune of both the TV channel and the sport that there was a native Gael available who was both an experienced broadcaster and had a love of rugby that harks back to being, in his own words ‘old enough to have seen Bob Hiller booting Scotland off Murrayfield from the kid’s enclosure’ when he was, again in his own words, with perhaps a smidgeon of commentators’ licence: ‘a silky stand-off in Lochaber high school mid 70s and occasional wiry scrum half.”

Others may not boast such advantages, but with BBC Alba committed to a level of coverage for at least the next two years that now leaves a lot of slots unfilled, MacLennan believes others now have a model to follow in the way that professional domestic rugby has benefited from the association.

“There’s a lesson for other sports in engaging with broadcasters, because the whole world of broadcasting is changing rapidly. The technology is making things more viable, but they have to engage with broadcasters to understand what the broadcasters need from governing bodies and participants to make it attractive to the wider audience, because the benefits of getting on screen are colossal,” he reckons.

“I think [growing audiences through sports coverage] is still a major factor in BBC Alba’s strategy. They have to have the numerical support and the goodwill of the non-Gaelic audience to survive and develop, because that then leads to political and financial support. Without that they won’t be able to proceed, which is why there is a huge conundrum as to what they replace it with.

“The strategy has been good in terms of attracting the non-Gaelic speaker, too. There are probably some minority sports, certainly some indigenous sports that are worth looking at it. It’s all to do with putting a visual product on the screen that is attractive to the audience.

“That’s what it’s about but that contributes also to the wider issue of regeneration of the language. The very fact that they dipped their toe in the water with rugby doesn’t stop them going to basketball or to ice hockey or any other sport.”