From now on I will buy all of my clothes in Marks and Spencer, including my underpants. If they sell prawn cocktail sandwiches I'll get them. And the day they produce an electric bike count me in the queue. Why? Well, they are backing youth rugby that's why, and I want to marry them.

As far as I'm concerned, this Saturday is just about the end of the rugby season. And what a long, long season it's been. Although I wake up every morning bouncing with the sunrise, flinging my arms round Jehovah's witnesses, and cuddling porcupines, I guess I still have to accept that rugby isn't the people's game. Which makes me cry every day. And, if you think about it, this year has been one of the strangest for rugby in living memory, and that's the truth.

Take a look at this weekend. While the rugby teams go for their cups at Murrayfield, all of that is overshadowed, certainly in the press anyway, by the fact that 22 blokes chasing a ball you're not even allowed to carry will be taking centre stage. Evidently if someone wins then they win something, and if the other team loses or draws then they lose, or something like that. It's all as obscure as Romario's socks to me.

But, now, Marks and Spencer, there's a different story. I recall me and the boy Lineen going once upon a time to a school in Easterhouse to coach some rugby, and it was good. Now Marks and Spencer, along with Glasgow and District rugby union, who deserve credit in this too, are starting it back up again. First and second year teams from Lochend school will be competing in a tournament at the school ground next Friday. Marks and sportsmatch will be funding the exercise which gives them free balls and T-shirts.

As well as that they will be starting rugby initiatives in Bellshill, Port Glasgow, Dumfries and East Ayrshire. Great. What chance rugby rivalling football? Well, there's so much catching up to do that I don't think it ever will.

Let's look at the facts. Most of the people coming out of school nowadays, or in the last 10 years, didn't play rugby. Haven't followed it ever. Talk about ''enjoying internationals, big man, but don't understand the rules''. To make a game big you have to promote it, and only one of the two domestic channels broadcasts it on a regular basis, and in the mass newspapers it's relegated way back there in the sports pages because the sports editors aren't interested. They don't understand it.

Rugby, quite rightly in a fair and even world, is regarded as the toffs game by the sort of inverted snobbery which comes with envy.

And here's where I think you need to make another valid point. You can argue the case for ever but rugby has had a negative press. A dreadful press, and almost all year. The press it has been given is almost destroying it up here in Scotland. Whose fault it that? Have hordes of evil press men ganged up on the game to dish the dirt. No sir. The Scottish game, and you have to accept this, has been shooting itself in the foot all season.

It hasn't helped that the international team did not do well, it hasn't helped that the districts did not do well, but professionalism, which was once the brave new world, has made rugby, and those who run rugby, look like novices at the fairground. Hit one coconut over, and there's another just round the corner to trouble you yet again.

And yet there have been huge contrasts. Someone, somewhere, has to answer the question: How come, with rugby booming in England, and South Africa, and France, and New Zealand, and Australia, that the game in Scotland has been under such pressure? You have to believe, as I do, that it is a good game. OK, hand on heart, I take Brian Meek's message from during the week that the game has stupid rough edges which have to be ironed out, and the fact that I limp due to rugby doesn't make me bitter - honest, but it is a good game. At its finest it's so spectacular, so bone-crunching, so fast, so skilfull, and so full of glory.

There will never be anything in sporting history for me to match the 1990 Grand Slam, or a Lions series win in South Africa, or the sight of a team in blue winning. There is something magical about it we must not forget. And the key is the kids, the kids who might want to win for Scotland. So thanks Marks and Spencer, and Glasgow district.

Er, my trousers are 36 waist, 36 leg, the loose change is average, and dresses to the left. Thank you. See you at the cup final. The rugby one.