Paul Thomas: False charge of poaching

They're calling it the Rape of the Pacific. And like most of the hot air being expelled throughout the nation, it involves rugby.

New Zealand stands accused of enticing the best players in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga to abandon their homelands and throw in their lot with the All Blacks.

This charge has been levelled time and again by British rugby writers, sometimes indignantly, sometimes with disgusted fatalism as if our poaching operation is so brazen and methodical that it's impossible to maintain the rage.

And as the temperature rises ahead of tonight's first test, it's getting another airing.

Leading the attack is Stephen Jones of the Sunday Times. Jones has created a persona built on relentless disparagement of New Zealand rugby - its players, stadia, referees, fans and media. It can only be a matter of time before he lays into the ball-boys.

Although Jones has one setting - a pop-eyed, bull moose roar of outrage - he's not always being entirely serious. When challenged, he tends to complain that Kiwis don't get irony.

We could search for the irony in his statement that Sitiveni Sivivatu's four-try All Black debut was "one of the saddest sporting occasions I can remember". We could try to work out what he really means when he tells his readers that "the All Blacks continue to steal the best talent from Fiji, Samoa and Tonga" and "are now an amalgam of four nations".

But seeing we're frightfully gauche provincials who think Irony is one of those all-girl hip-hop groups, we'll just have to take these assertions at face value.

There are 10 Polynesians in the current All Black squad, five of whom were born here. Four went to primary school here. Sivivatu arrived when he was 17 to attend Wesley College.

We may think that because these players' parents came to New Zealand in search of a better life, because they grew up, went to school and learned to play rugby here, because they regard themselves as New Zealanders, it's appropriate for them to wear the black jersey.

Apparently not; apparently we stole them. Apparently this constitutes the Rape of the Pacific.

That's not my idea of irony; that's my idea of bullshit.

The British rugby media rat pack choose to ignore the decades of immigration which have made Polynesians one of the four main ethnic groups in our multi-cultural society and Auckland the biggest Polynesian city in the world.

It's odd that they find it so hard to get their heads around the phenomenon of immigrant communities producing more than their fair share of outstanding athletes given that it has also happened in England over roughly the same period.

English track-and-field and boxing have flourished largely thanks to athletes of West Indian and African descent, and the days of the all-vanilla English soccer team are long gone.

Were these athletes poached or are they New Britons?

And on the subject of flags of convenience, how about that good southern man Brendon Laney, who a week after setting foot in Scotland was lining up at Murrayfield hoping that the TV cameras wouldn't focus on him during the singing of Flower of Scotland?

But that's okay. It's okay too that South Africans like Mike Catt, Stuart Abbott and current Lion Matt Stevens play for England, even though England already has more rugby players than any other country. And it's okay for France, when they played the All Blacks last November, to field two South Africans, a New Zealander and a flanker from Cameroon, even though France already has more players than any other country except England.

What's not okay is Jerry Collins, having arrived in New Zealand aged four with his family, having attended primary school in Porirua and St Pat's College in Wellington, having joined Norths, the club he still plays for whenever he can, having represented New Zealand at secondary school, under 19, under 21 and A level, running on to Jade Stadium tonight in an All Black jersey.

Well, I can understand that the Brits would prefer he didn't, but to insist that he shouldn't be an All Black because he should be playing for another country is - here we go again - bullshit.

It would be laughable if it wasn't for the nasty, lingering suspicion that underpinning this campaign is a mindset that those white South Africans, Australians and New Zealanders who swap countries at the drop of a hat are exercising their free will while the poor, naive Polynesians are being led by the nose.

After this week's Australia-England one-day cricket match, The Guardian website ran a headline describing Kevin Pietersen's 91 off 65 balls as the "best innings by an Englishman".

Only he isn't. Pietersen was born in Pietermaritzburg, represented South Africa at under-19 level and played first-class cricket for KwaZulu-Natal. Convinced that his progress was being blocked by the quota system that promotes non-white players into national teams, Pietersen defected to England in 2001.

Now that's irony - of the unconscious variety.