Rugby nationality debate: How eligibility rules impact international game - Paul Lewis

Dublin , Ireland - 13 November 2021; Bundee Aki and James Lowe of Ireland after their side's victory in the Autumn Nations Series match between Ireland and New Zealand at Aviva Stadium in Dublin. (Photo By Brendan Moran/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

OPINION

Sometimes the poor old game of rugby just can’t win – no sooner has the world body changed the eligibility rules to allow more players to play more international rugby than the complaint begins to flow that there is no such thing as nationality any more.

In his Daily Telegraph column, Oliver Brown calls such players “guns for hire”, bemoaning the fact that “even a competition as enmeshed in tribal identity as the Six Nations has drifted from those moorings”. Scotland’s squad of 39 contains 23 players born somewhere that wasn’t Scotland.

It would be a point well made if it wasn’t for the fact Scotland had just beaten England for the fourth consecutive time; Brown’s observations might not be so redolent of grapes of the not sweet variety.

He went on to finger Ireland’s expat Kiwis: “Even the Irish, heralded as the gold standard in everything they touch, know what it means to exploit rugby’s nebulous definitions of nationhood. Bundee Aki, James Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park are three players who have underpinned Ireland’s transformation into Grand Slam winners and, for a while, the world’s No 1-ranked side.

“But all of them were integrated from New Zealand’s professional rugby system, targeted well into adulthood for moves to Ireland so that they could fulfil the residency rules. Lowe is about as Irish as McDonald’s Shamrock Shake, coming to the country when he was 25 and having played for the Maori All Blacks against the British and Irish Lions.

“Here is a player who, on recognising in his mid-20s that he was never going to realise his All Black dreams, swapped Nelson for Dublin on the assurance he would be wearing green three years later. The decision, while an emphatic success for his CV, casts an unflattering reflection on the romance of test rugby.”

But does it? There is more than a hint here of a dinosaur watching the meteor plunge to Earth and thinking it ought not to be allowed. The real problem is not the eligibility laws but rugby’s weird imbalances – between the hemispheres and between the fat cats of the Six Nations and the emerging nations who can only look at rugby’s top table and wonder where their seats are.

In admittedly over-simplified terms, the south has more talent; the north has more money. That’s why players go there and, yes, because of the promise of international rugby. Correct that imbalance by helping the south financially and let’s see how many players swap countries then.

However, isn’t leaving a team for redemptive reasons part of the romance of sport? Who can resist a reject making good and getting one over on those who thought he wasn’t good enough? Aki is, by some distance, now the best second-five on the planet.

Why should rugby deny a player like that the stage on which he has shown he can perform? In these days of often borderless travel and a diversified world, surely a petty fact like place of birth should not determine someone’s future.

There’s also nothing easy about serving out three years to become eligible for another country. There are a lot of bad things that can happen in three years – knees, shoulders, cruciate ligaments, concussions – and then these players must prove they have what previous judges said they didn’t.

Transferability has also become a huge part of top-level sport, at club and international level. In the English Premier League, how many Manchester City players were born in Manchester? How many Blues players were born in Auckland? Why is Steven Adams playing in the NBA?

Nationality really doesn’t matter, except maybe for those players from the South Pacific – Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Some have taken up residency in the UK (Hey Oliver, remember Manu Tuilagi? Born in Samoa, he played for England plenty) and do so because they get the chance to set their families up for life.

Under the old rules, if they played for another country, they could not subsequently play for their country of birth – a weird bureaucratic restriction which pretty much amounted to restraint of trade.

Brown also said: “On paper, the enabling of all these nationality shifts should prove beneficial for the game’s emerging countries. The problem is that many players are jumping ship from one Tier One nation to another.”

However, the last World Cup showed that Pasifika players who’d represented other countries and/or been stymied by club obligations were returning to their nations of birth. Former All Blacks joined former Wallabies in Pasiifika sides – like Charles Piutau, Charlie Faumuina, Steve Lutatua, Malakai Fekitoa, Augie Pulu, Vaea Fifita, Adam Coleman, Christian Leali’ifano…shall I go on?

The Islands have long been mined for talent, so this is just a drop in the (Pacific) ocean. Given more time, the eligibility rules will reap more rewards for those nations. So even Brown’s contention about players only jumping onto Tier One ships doesn’t quite hold true.

Hired guns? Maybe, but they can also be called hired healers because what players like Lowe, Gibson-Park and Lowe give back to rugby is more than they take away.

Paul Lewis has been a journalist since the last ice age. Sport has been a lifetime pleasure and part of a professional career during which he has written four books, and covered Rugby World Cups, America’s Cups, Olympic & Commonwealth Games and more.