NIKKI WALKER may have scored a brace against Canada last week and Scott MacLeod got the all clear from the chemists at UK Sport but these two slivers of good news for two of Hawick's favourite sons provide only a modest silver lining to the dirty black cloud that is currently hovering over the town's rugby club who yesterday fell to the bottom of the league.

Hawick are one of just two clubs never to have played outside the top flight since national leagues were first introduced back in 1973 (Heriot's are the other). Indeed the Borderers won the first five titles outright and were victorious in 10 out of the first 14 years – an astonishing record of success that is unmatched by any side since. More recently the men in green won the league title in 2001 and the treble of league, cup and Border League the following year. However, since those giddy heights the club have usually been found towards the bottom of the Premier One food chain.

It's early days. If you had to put any money on one team in Scotland surviving a relegation dogfight it would be the men from Mansfield and that is exactly what they have on their hands. Last weekend three of the bottom four won their matches, Hawick was the odd man out. They lost badly to Heriot's, the match was tied at half-time but the Borderers ran up the white flag after the break to allow the city slickers to run in six tries. The club's own website had this to say of their performance: "The second half can only be described as the one of the worst displays ever from a Hawick team at Mansfield". These are harsh words but fully justified if club president Donald MacLeod is to be believed.

"There was no spirit, no fight," says MacLeod of that second half. "No one wants to be the first president in the second division and the committee have thought long and hard about what the problem is at the club but it's difficult to put your finger on it."

The big picture problems of Borders towns are well documented. The decline of traditional industries on which they were built, such as knitwear, has all but snuffed out their heartbeat. In an old mill town like Hawick the next generation has little hope of a future. Young men increasingly move to the central belt in search of jobs and tertiary education. Few are then willing to make the long journey up and down the A7 to train twice a week.

But it must be galling for Scotland's most successful side that their own woes arrive at just the time when one of their Border rivals has shown just what can be achieved with a home-grown team. Selkirk have won nine of their 13 fixtures this season, Hawick just two. Mansfield Park clearly has other problems that are peculiar to the club with a lack of first-class players chief amongst them and those they do boast are mostly missing for a variety of reasons.

The club have currently lost the services of their star fly-half Rory Hutton and centre Graham Hogg, who are both away with the Scotland Sevens squad. Their main source of ball at the sidelines, lock Craig Charters, has suffered a shoulder injury and will be out for months rather than weeks, while Graham Scott, the prop who was hitherto famous for missing a match to get a hair perm, is heading overseas.

Another stalwart of the forward pack, Nick MacTaggart, is also absent while he serves a four-week suspension for illegal use of the boot. This is the end result of an incident in which Edinburgh Accies skipper Dan Teague suffered a horrific injury to his face that required 40-odd stitches/staples. The referee was on the spot and saw nothing untoward and, while the Accies flanker may beg to differ, Hawick officials insist that MacTaggart was, at worst, reckless.

The club is going to appeal the decision. This may have something to do with the fact that, in January, a Welshman by the name of Rhys Garfield was sentenced to 15 months in prison for stamping on an opponent's head in a rugby match. His victim's wound only needed 30 stitches. The worry for Hawick is that by not appealing the ban MacTaggart is somehow accepting responsibility and laying himself open to further legal action in the future.

More bizarrely, Hawick have also lost the services of front row forward Greg MacLeod, who walked out of the Mansfield second XV and joined Jed Forest, despite the fact that his father Donald is the Hawick president. This caused a flurry of reports in the tabloids suggesting that the president was at loggerheads with the club coach Jim Hay for not playing his boy, a charge he denies.

"There has been no friction between me and Jim Hay," Donald MacLeod repeatedly insists, perhaps a little too often to be entirely believable. "I am deeply upset about some of the things that have been written recently in the gutter press. Greg felt that he had the ability to play at a higher level and he was asked to join Jed. He made it clear that there were no grudges."

While MacLeod denies any friction between himself and the coach, a recent incident after a match against Watsonians cannot have helped matters as Hay, like so many of his players, has been posted as missing in action.

As the match drew to a close, Hawick were leading until Watsonians hoisted a cross-field kick that led directly to a try. Many at Mansfield thought the winger was a long way offside. The disappointment of seeing hard-earned points going astray thanks to an official's perceived error was too much for the club coach and Hay accosted the referee after the match. Reports vary as to whether the confrontation was physical or just verbal but the net result is that Hay finds himself banned from the touchline at exactly the time his team most need his guidance. Oh, and that ban came from his club, the SRU has still to pass judgment on the matter.

"We didn't want to ban Jim but we got a letter from the SRU advising us to take action," MacLeod says. "We discussed this with Jim and he was quite happy with the three-month ban, it's his third offence. The SRU have still to make their decision and Jim has already made it clear that he is not going to attend the hearing. If that's the case any action they do take will only be 10 times worse. We can only do what we can do. We're damned if we take action and we're damned if we don't."

But it is less clear what action MacLeod can take to halt Hawick's slide into second class rugby. The club has recruited some Fijian imports from the Dreghorn barracks in Edinburgh to bolster the young side but MacLeod makes it clear that he wasn't party to that and places the responsibility firmly at the feet of the coach. For his part, Hay is unable to respond since, along with his touchline ban, he has also been prevented from talking to the press. However friends of the former Scotland hooker make it clear that he is as disillusioned with life at Mansfield as anyone else.

"Jim Hay has been with us for five years," says MacLeod. "Now I'm not saying that he's done his time but perhaps we need an injection of something else to give the club a boost. We are looking at getting some of the past players to put something back into the club because we're not a million miles away. We took six tries off Selkirk and they are sitting in third place and we scored four against Hawks. But we've lost a lot of players – just about every other team in the division fields Hawick players against us and I'm not making any comment on why that should be. I counted the other day that 28 players have left the club, although that includes academy players, in the last 18 months. My son Greg was the 28th to go. Lots of players are unhappy." The president quotes a line from the Hawick song 'Teri-bus': "Aye sunk in deep dejection…" to explain the prevailing mood.

A final word goes to the legendary Hawick player and coach Jim Renwick, whose son Neil is a regular in the club's midfield. "The town is not behind the club like it used to be. When we played in the first ever cup final in 1996 it seemed like half the town was there, but more recently when we played Boroughmuir in the first round there were scarcely more than 200 folk at Mansfield. We need a bit of success to bring back the crowds."

Is second class rugby a real possibility for Scotland's most famous and most successful rugby club after 25 uninterrupted years in the top flight?

"We're in trouble." Renwick's reply does not augur well for the Greens.

GREEN MACHINE

HUE AND CRY

Hawick were formed in December 1873 and first played in blue and white striped jerseys. Two years later they adopted their now famous dark green strip.

LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

Hawick are Scotland's most successful club side having won the league 12 times since the official championship was introduced in season 1973-74.

HAT-TRICK OF FIRSTS

They boast a proud record of being the first Border League champions in 1901-02, the first official Scottish champions in 1973-74 and the first Scottish Cup winners in 1995-96.

IF THE CAP FITS

Hawick have supplied 58 full Scotland internationals, the latest being David Callam who made his debut in November 2006. Their most capped players are Colin Deans, Jim Renwick and Tony Stanger who each played for Scotland 52 times.