Clown of the week: Scott Hastings

As one of the ex-players asked about about Scotland's place in the 6 Nations tournament following the dismal defeat to England, in defending his home nation Scott Hastings went on a strange and ignorant tirade against the passion of Georgian support for their team.

"Let’s be quite frank, if Georgia came in and took Scotland's position are they going to deliver 60,000 supporters, a passionate audience and support base? Quite frankly they are not." - Scott Hastings 12/02/2014

If the lesser Hastings brother had bothered to research the figures or merely observed a game before making ignorant statements, he would find that Georgia (along with Madagascar of course) are actually the best and most passionately supported side outside the Tier 1 clique, and in fact got an attendance of 55,000 just this weekend against Russia and one thing Georgian fans aren't lacking it's passion. Quite frankly he's talking pure and unfiltered garbage.

Out of curiosity, I wonder whether Hastings applied this criterion to Italy when they first joined the 6 Nations and played out a 24,000 stadium. A nation, that until playing the All Blacks at the San Siro as recently as November 2009 had never passed a 50,000 crowd despite a feast of big games against all the leading nations, whereas no 6 Nations or Tri Nations side has visited Tbilisi for a test in their entire history. I also wonder how passionate Scotland's crowds would be if we swapped their Spring diet of playing England and France at home and replaced it with Belgium, Russia and Romania.

Out of all the more valid things that could have been argued in response to the question, such as the commercial reasons, that relegation arguably is not a good system anyway or that Scotland are a slightly better side than Georgia, bashing the Georgians for the passion of their support was an odd and utterly ill-informed and foolish angle to pick.

Georgia had a crowd of 54,827 for their match with Russia this weekend