Rugby Australia appears poised to push the panic button and, in doing so, threaten to harpoon next year's Super Rugby competition before it gets off the ground.
News that Rugby Australia is preparing to scrap, or significantly amend, the Wallabies' existing 60-cap 'Giteau law' selection criteria for overseas-based players musthave sirens screeching at New Zealand Rugby headquarters.
This year Australia's five Super Rugby teams managed two wins from 25 games against their New Zealand counterparts. The continuation of that dominance, following the Covid-enforced hiatus, quickly became a turnoff during Super Rugby transtasman.
Opting to open the floodgates and further diminish Australia's shallow talent pool will do nothing to improve the competitiveness of their Super sides, or the credibility of the new 12-team competition yet to officially launch.
At a time when attracting crowds to the All Blacks is proving challenging, New Zealand's procession of Japanese sabbaticals – Damian McKenzie is next in line to follow Beauden Barrett, Brodie Retallick and Sam Whitelock to skip Super Rugby - does not help drive punters through the gates.
Yet the prospect of Australia's Super Rugby teams losing their best Wallabies abroad could be a crippling blow, one Super Rugby can ill afford, particularly as two start-up teams in the form of Moana Pasifika and the Fijian Drua will need two, possibly three, seasons to find their feet.
Making the selection change, specifically designed to allow Wallabies coach Dave Rennie to select locks Will Skelton, Rory Arnold, loose forward Sean McMahon and midfielder Samu Kerevi from abroad, may strengthen the national team in the short term.
Long term, however, it is certain to further weaken Australia's Super Rugby base that is already not fit to sustain five teams.
The timing of the decision could not be worse, either; coming as it did on the back of Saturday night's record 57-22 drubbing at Eden Park that ensured the All Blacks locked the Bledisloe Cup away for a 19th straight year.
A change in policy would allow the Wallabies to select the likes of Samu Kerevi. Photo / Getty
Rugby Australia seems to have been influenced by two factors. The first is the benefit of someone else paying their top players' wages.
For a union on its knees financially, decreasing the top-end spend on players would allow money to prop up other areas of the game.
The second driver is the recent Springboks success. If the Boks select from offshore and still claim the World Cup and British and Irish Lions series in the past two years, why not follow suit?
While selecting the national team from aboard has worked, to this point, for South Africa, they have an infinitely larger and stronger domestic player pool than Australia, where rugby is fifth cab off the sporting code rank.
The Boks aside, warnings exist in the South African model. Look no further than their Super Rugby teams which have, by and large, gone backwards in a big way since changing their selection criteria.
Italian side Benetton thumping the Bulls 35-8 in this year's Pro14 final, and the British Lions beating the Sharks (54-7), Stormers (49-3) and Lions (56-14) in their limited warm up matches last month offer clear examples of this concerning regression.
Selecting from offshore comes with other major challenges, too. Whereas local players are generally aligned to workload and strength and conditioning programmes, allowing national coaches easy access and regular contact, players based in European competitions are often run into the ground, and returning from the Japanese Top League to test rugby is no straightforward leap.
From a cohesion perspective selecting from aboard can also seriously undermine national teams. Saturday's starting All Blacks XV featured seven players from the Crusaders and four from the Blues which equates to inherent combinations, the influence of which on any team cannot be understated.
Selecting from five Super Rugby teams is difficult enough let alone throwing the door open to the rest of the world and then attempting to get a national team on the same page, often in a short window.
The Wallabies selection goalposts last swiftly moved in order to shoehorn Matt Giteau and, to a lesser extent, Drew Mitchell into Michael Cheika's 2015 World Cup team that lost the final to the All Blacks.
It was a quick fix solution that ultimately did little to transform the Australian rugby landscape.
In now preparing to scrap the Giteau law, history is on the verge of repeating - only this time with far worse ramifications that will engulf New Zealand through Super Rugby, where Australia's five teams could fast become deadweight.
Once the overseas selection door is flung open, it cannot be closed.
Reflecting on the strength on his Brumbies teams, former Wallabies captain Stirling Mortlock went as far as to label the imminent selection move illogical.
