I would like to talk about Moseley's first try again, the one that Greg McDonald scored two minutes into the match against Launceston last Saturday.

It was made to look relatively easy because of the quality of the pass that set it up. McDonald had to reach for the ball and in doing so he was angled naturally into a gap that he took with alacrity.

Smashing try and it virtually set up Moseley's victory there and then. And where did this lovely pass come from? From some visiting South African, over here to set up his pension? From some top-of-the-bill Tongan feeding on the easy pickings that now abound in English rugby?

No, it was home made. You cannot find rugby more indigenous than this. The giver of the pass was 21-year-old Oliver Thomas, who was born with black and red blood in his veins.

Thomas was reared by Moseley; he was sired by a Moseley man. So was McDonald. And so was Tom Warren, who scored Moseley's second try, and it occurred to me that 31 of the winning points were scored by young men who were virtually born on the premises.

There might not be too many active supporters of rugby football in Birmingham and its surrounds but those who take their Saturday pleasures at Bournbrook have a very strong association with the object of their passion.

It's a throw-back experience. A warming reminder of the days when Moseley, more or less, were an amalgam of the talent that poured from the rugby playing schools of the city. Oh my Finlan and my Fielding long ago!

And that's how it was at Coventry, it's how it was at Gloucester, Bristol and Northampton. A town team was exactly that. A symbol of local pride and powerful symbols they were.

Keith Fairbrother has never signed a front row even comparable with the ones that he played in at Coundon Road.

Coventry have their faithful supporters still and the club cater for them well but, as with nearly all the leading clubs in the land, you watch them for entertainment value. Only the name of the club is local.

Going to a rugby ground these days is like going to the music hall. You are attracted by what's on the bill. Roll up, roll up! Come and see the monster wing from Fiji.

Fairbrother is not so much a club chairman as an impresario and that is not to condemn any of his motives. Like all the other clubs, he wants success and modern rugby has evolved - should we say mutated? - along the principle that the price of success does not matter.

Perhaps it doesn't; new rugby's story has yet to be told and judged. And that's the thought that takes me back to Moseley.

The club have been breeding players, not international stars, perhaps, but good quality players, for years. Let's go back to the advent of professionalism.

Those players, whom men like White, Warren, Beale and Nutt spent hours, weeks and years informing were the club's future. Their ticket back to the top. And where are Moseley today? At the third level of the game.

We know how panic, bad management and lack of vision scuttled Moseley on their voyage into the professional game but with a player-producing structure as fecund as theirs, why do they languish still? And when will the ascent begin?

If, as has happened, they nurture players who are exceptionally good, they will lose them to clubs who can pay them more and offer them higher rugby. Will young Thomas, when his game is complete, become a target for Premiership clubs? One has already sent out feelers in his direction.

Say, though, Moseley keep what they've got. Their present side will surely get better and are already a decent bet for promotion next season. But is that it? Will the club simply be treading water after that?

That's a question I put to a man who is immersed in the club's fortunes, the father of one of the present side. To get out of level three, to stay at level two, he opined, Moseley would have to forget the romantic notion of thriving through their own production initiatives.

"We are going to have to buy," he said. "We are going to have to bring in a few name players."

Moseley tried that once. What a headache running rugby clubs has become.