It was a modest milestone, almost unremarked, but no less significant for that. Last weekend, the SRU Premiership season reached its midpoint, each team having played nine games, each still with nine to play. Remarkably, or perhaps not in this age of global warming, not a single game had been postponed. In this sprint of a campaign, the runners were well into their strides.

More significant still was the fact that every coach had seen every other side in the division. A good point, in other words, to canvas their views on the elite level of Scottish club rugby today. Is the sport in good health? Are all referees really numpties? What players or teams have impressed most? And why have the results been so bizarre?

The last question is perhaps the most critical, as well as being the hardest to answer. In the 30-plus years since the national structure came into being, clear front- runners have emerged by this stage of the season, with most others in the division receding in the rear-view mirror. If we had a two-horse race we celebrated the league’s competitiveness, but this season we have had a cavalcade of contenders.

Why? Is it a sign of quality, or a collective diminishing of standards. The league has been engrossing, wonderfully tight, but has it been any good? Are Scotland’s top clubs rising, spurring each other on? Or are they sinking in each other’s ordure?

As our figures show, only three of Scotland’s top club coaches believe that the overall quality has improved. In black and white it is a worrying statistic, but all the coaches we canvassed still saw signs of optimism as well. Pushed on the matter, even those who were most adamant that rugby had hit the skids this season struggled to produce a compelling reason behind the trend. Most called it a quirk, a demographic blip.

Damien Reidy of Aberdeen suggested the fear of relegation, even in a season when only one side will go down, was still a factor that tended to stifle teams. Cammy Mather, the Watsonians player/coach, believed that the quality had been lower than last year, but was improving fast. Bob McKillop of Heriot’s was disappointed by the lack of ambition in evidence, but also commented that teams were beginning to be more adventurous.

What, though, of the fact that every team in the division seems capable of beating every other side. The patterns of results in recent weeks have been startling, the trend highlighted best of all by title contenders Boroughmuir. A month ago, they hammered reigning Scottish champions Glasgow Hawks, then posted convincing back-to-back victories over Edinburgh rivals Heriot’s and Watsonians. With praise ringing in their ears, they set off to visit struggling Aberdeen Grammar – and were duly played off the Rubislaw park as they fell to the most unexpected defeat of the season.

All good entertainment, though, which is more than might be said of the refereeing standards on offer. With all allowances made for the fact that the average coach would sooner eat his tighthead prop’s underpants than praise a match official, the anger was quite remarkable. Only two of the coaches believed that the referees’ standards had improved in the past year; most of those who thought the opposite said the decline had been sharp.

A specific and common complaint was that inexperienced referees had been promoted to the top level prematurely. “I’m all for developing referees,” said one coach, “but not at this level. It just seems madness to me to have these new, young guys taking charge of top games when more senior officials are running the touchline. Surely it should be the other way around.”

Unsurprisingly, after a weekend that had seen Currie restate their title credentials with an emphatic win over Watsonians, the west Edinburgh outfit attracted more nominations as the most impressive side in the division (three votes) and as the team most likely to win the championship (five votes) than any other team. Even around Malleny Park they might struggle to muster a single vote for artistic impression, but there appears to be a general impression that the youngest team in the league is motoring along quite nicely.

Praise, too, for some unsung heroes. Boroughmuir stalwart Angus Martyn seems to have been battering around the fringes in Scottish club rugby since the beginning of time, but his efforts have not gone unrecognised by the four coaches who nominated him as their standout player of the season. Currie number 8 was also mentioned in despatches in a poll in which eight of the 10 votes cast were taken by loose forwards.

What else? General indifference to the forthcoming P1 Super Cup: a few coaches saying it was a chance to experiment, more saying it merely filled a hole in the calendar. Also, perhaps surprisingly, a majority view that the expansion to 12 teams next season will be good for the top flight of the club game.

And just one other thing. There is a view that the club game is struggling at the moment, that it is a shadow of what it used to be. There may be an element of truth there, as the professional tier routinely skims off the best players available, but the abiding impression of this exercise is that the coaches are still united in their passion and enthusiasm for driving rugby forward. The sport is in strong and caring hands.