Gala is over as Gregor heads for the hills

The sun beats down on Netherdale as Steve Bates directs his Border Reivers through their Wednesday morning practice session. With the humpbacked Eildon Hills in the middle distance, it is difficult to imagine a more idyllic setting than the Galashiels ground.

For Gregor Townsend, zealously orchestrating playing operations for the green-bibbed side, there will not be many more days like this, though. Come next Saturday evening, when the final whistle blows on the Reivers' Magners League encounter against the Ospreys, it will be the end not just for Scottish rugby's disbanding third- ranked professional team but also for Scottish rugby's mercurial genius of an outside-half.

Two weeks past his 34th birthday, and four years on from the last of his 82 caps, Townsend will be hanging up his boots for good when he steps off the Netherdale pitch - the home turf on which he took his first faltering steps as a five-year-old in the Gala club's mini- rugby section.

"I don't think I'll be that emotional," he says, taking a seat in the stand and pondering the neat bookending of his playing career. "I remember feeling emotional when I left Northampton - I had been there three years and I was leaving a group of friends. This is different, because I made my mind up a long time ago that I was going to retire and the team's getting axed anyway, so everybody's going to be on their way. Nobody will be here in two weeks' time, never mind next season.

"It's a totally different team to the one I started with and it's a totally different world. It's not Gala I'm playing for. It's a Borders team that just plays here. It's a group of professional players. Maybe it would be different if I was one of a group of 15 players playing for Gala against Melrose - one of 15 players representing your home town - and I was going to miss something I'd grown up with."

Townsend was a Gala player in that different rugby world, that pre-professional era, when he won his first cap for Scotland. That was in March 1993, when he replaced Craig Chalmers in a Calcutta Cup contest that featured one of Twickenham's all-time great tries, finished by Rory Underwood and launched with a blinding break from deep by Stuart Barnes. Already, though, the callow youth with the Tintin tuft had started the process of spreading his wings.

A three-month stint with the Warringah club in Sydney the previous summer sparked a wanderlust that also took Townsend to France (with Brive, Castres and Montpellier), to South Africa (with the Natal Sharks) and to England (with Northampton). "The Warringah move was the catalyst for my thinking, for going to all those different countries," he says. "I became a different player overnight. I improved my handling, my alignment, all my skills. I was like a sponge, soaking everything up.

"It was the same when I went to England and to France. I used all of those opportunities to improve myself as a rugby player by exposing myself to different environments and different approaches to the game.

"There was more of a contrast back then - in the mid-1990s, just before and just after the game went professional - between how Scotland played and how England played and how the game was played in France and in Australia. It would be different for a player now. Most of the teams these days play a pretty similar style."

Orthodoxy was never a Townsend trait on the international stage. At times he was a supreme improviser, most famously when executing what has become known as "the Toonie flip" - the sublime reverse pass that unlocked the French defence for Gavin Hastings to claim the last-minute score which secured victory for Scotland in Paris in 1995. On other occasions, he was prone to play on a different wavelength to some of his Scotland colleagues. As a consequence, he was periodically shunted out into the centres, on to the bench, or even out of the selection frame altogether.

Townsend was at his best for Scotland in 1996, when he dined out on Bryan Redpath's silver-platter service, and in 1999, when John Leslie was at his sharpest as a second five-eighth foil. He also purred for the Lions, playing in between Matt Dawson and Scott Gibbs in the two winning Tests in South Africa in 1997.

Now, 10 years on, the Galashiels Lion is getting ready to summon one final roar.

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