Border Reivers can be pulled back from the brink of closure despite England's top clubs joining French teams in boycotting the Heineken Cup and European Challenge Cup next season, according to the man fronting the campaign to save them.
Local councillor Graham Garvie addressed a meeting of about 30 club representatives in Edinburgh last night where he unveiled the business plan he hopes will persuade the Scottish Rugby Union to grant a stay of execution.
However, it was confirmed the SRU would not be asked to contribute to the club in the future, with appearance money from the Magners League and the Heineken Cup being used to provide around two-thirds of the estimated £1.2 million budget that has been identified as the minimum required for the club to operate.
With the future of the Heineken Cup now in jeopardy, the need for alternative income sources has become urgent - although Garvie has insisted that the current impasse in France and England should not be taken too seriously.
He said: 'It's not a spanner in the works, it's just the French being the French and it's happened before. This is only April and a lot of things can still happen. There is a lot of posturing going on.'
'Such is the interest in rugby and such is the interest in television that something will come out of this. I'm not at all despondent. There will be a re-jigging of some kind - there are all sorts of possibilities.'
'It's an interesting situation but I'm an eternal optimist and I'm determined that something will happen that will work for everybody.'
Even if the Heineken Cup was to fall by the wayside, Garvie believes alternative sources of income can be generated.
'The figure we are looking at is about £1.2 million to run a team in the Borders, and if we lose the money from the Heineken Cup it's about £800,000 that has to be found from somewhere else - and we're examining that at the moment.'
'We have only been at this for the last week, but we have already been talking to a number of business people and public authorities about the possibility of putting alternative financial streams together. I can say no more about it than that.'
Garvie conceded a budget of £1.2 million would not be enough to make the team truly competitive in modern professional rugby, but he hopes the club's spending power can be increased through successfully engaging with the local population.
'You've got to be at the races, and if we don't do something we might as well all pack up and go home. We're trying to take two steps back and then hopefully things will start to happen fairly quickly once we are back in the game,' he said.
'You can be optimistic or pessimistic. We were at closure last week, we're now looking at continuation is some shape or form, and that to me is an optimistic situation.
'We haven't got all the answers, but we are working hard to produce something that will work in the short term, and in the longer term we have to have a product that is attractive to the public, which is a winning team.
'That's not affordable at the moment, so it's a kind of Catch-22 situation, but we'll get there.'
