by Your best against our best: it’s the sacrosanct precept on which all international team sports are built. And yet a contest as ingrained in tribal identity as the Six Nations has departed from these fixtures. Take last weekend’s Calcutta Cup, a competition electrified by Scotland’s Duhan van der Merwe, whose name hardly suggests a rugged Cairngorms clan. Not that the issue can be reduced to one player. Of the 39-man squad selected by Gregor Townsend this year to wear the blue of Scotland, a remarkable 23 were born elsewhere.
The fluctuation of nationality is always in the background at this competition. I remember speaking in 2012 to Mouritz Botha, who spent all his formative years in South Africa, having made the grade for England courtesy of the three-year residency rule. “You develop pride and passion for your country over time,” he explained. But is this enough? Can this fast track to unwavering national loyalty be more, in sporting terms, than an alliance of convenience?
Ollie Hassell-Collins provides an instructive example. The memory of the two Six Nations caps the winger earned last year for England is still fresh, where he discussed how long he dreamed of wearing the red rose. A year on, with his career at Test level having hit the buffers, he reveals to the Telegraph that he is just as smitten with the notion of representing Wales. He has a Welsh grandmother, you see. And, assuming he doesn’t surprise England grade in the meantime, he’ll have just what he needs to start belting Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (My Father’s Land) in 2026.
The story is quickly entering the realm of absence. Hassell-Collins, we should emphasize, recommending nothing against the rules. World Rugby’s Regulation Eight clarifies that his qualifications are confirmed when a grandparent was born in the same country, and that national allegiances can be changed after a 36-month retirement period. But we can certainly pretend that his story is a passion project. This is a player who, as it is, is not even considered good enough for the England A team, but who is allowed to keep the Welsh selection on the table as a convenient contingency.
It raises the question of what we are looking at here. Eddie Butler’s Six Nations video montages would be famous for centuries of battles and bloodlines, but realities on the pitch today are not always so poetic. Look at Nick Tompkins, the center who was born in Sidcup to English parents, went to school in Bromley, and turned England with the Under-18s, Under-20s and the Saxons. Now, after all that upbringing under the English system, he competes for Wales, for no better reason than that he has a Wrexham-born grandmother.
The Tompkins case provides an argument for Test eligibility to be based on a stronger family bond or a longer period of residency. After all, this is a controversy that stretches far beyond Wales. Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, a hot international wing prospect at 21, was born and bred in Cardiff but chose to play for England the tried and tested grandmotherly way. You can imagine Neil Jenkins spoke for many when Warren Gatland quoted the ex-flyer as saying: “If he doesn’t want to play for Wales, he can be out.” A young man growing up under the shadow of the Princely State, but still vulnerable to the unfathomable enemy? It would have been unimaginable once.
Today, it’s almost de rigueur. Therefore, the entry requirements are now complicated if you ask whether it is possible to call a Scottish team that just beat England, because most of them were not born there. In addition, Paul Tait, an expert on this subject, has researched for American Rugby News, it shows how 22 of the 23 imported players can not even be called homegrown. Alec Hepburn and Ben White have previously worn England colours, while Jack Dempsey turned out for Australia. Ben Healy and Sione Tuipulotu were specifically recruited from overseas to play for Scotland, Healy did not move out of Ireland until he was 23 and Tuipolutu only arrived from Australia at 24.
This seems to be untenable late for anyone who insists that they have received an indefinite dedication to their adopted land. On the contrary, it benefits the countries that carefully use a loose system to their advantage. And Scotland, in the Six Nations, are the runaway leaders on this front. The 23 players born outside England may be a huge figure, but their record is not worth it. Two years ago, it was 27. Compare this with their rivals: England have six foreign players, Wales five, Ireland eight, France six and Italy eight.
External talent strangling domestic development
It would take a brave soul to convey this great discrepancy to the Scotland fans in Edinburgh last Saturday night. Everywhere you looked outside Murrayfield, the pipes were damaged and the Tennent was flowing. If celebrating a fourth Calcutta Cup on the bounce – a sequence unmatched for 128 years – was not worth celebrating, what was? There is a legitimate debate to be had, however, about the extent to which the Test team’s reliance on external talent is hindering domestic development. When Ireland under-20s played Scotland last year, they were hammered 82-7.
Even the Irish, who are cited as the gold standard in everything they do, know what it means to exploit rugby’s vague definitions of nationalism. Bundee Aki, James Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park are three players who established Ireland’s transformation into Grand Slam winners and, for a time, the world’s No. 1. But they were all integrated into the New Zealand professional rugby system, well aimed at adults moving to Ireland so they could meet the residency rules. Lowe is as Irish as McDonald’s Shamrock Shake, coming to the country when he was 25 and having played for the Maori All Blacks against Great Britain and Ireland.
How much does all this have to do with it? There can be no doubting Lowe’s popularity in Ireland, given the wing’s great performances, along with frequent protests that his head and heart are in the Emerald Isle. Very funny, of course – and his father decided to watch one of his victories wearing a full Irish outfit and a Leinster hat. But technically, it does nothing to burnish its Irish credentials. This is a player that Nelson moved to Dublin when he recognized in his mid-20s that he was not going to achieve his All Black dream, on the assurance that he would be wearing green three years later. While this decision has been a huge success for his CV, he reflects restlessly on the romance of Test rugby.
On paper, enabling all these nationality changes should benefit the emerging countries of the game. The problem is that many players are jumping ship from League One nation to another country. This is a practice expressly prohibited in rugby league, but in union it is widespread. Just as Lowe reinvented himself in Ireland out of frustration that his progress had stalled in New Zealand, Hassell-Collins’ design of swapping England for Wales is purely pragmatic, befitting neglect. A self-sustaining cabin looks more like the top tier of the game than ever.
It is strange that these patterns have not sparked an even more urgent discussion in rugby. In football, many have a lot of steam when considering choosing a successor to Gareth Southgate who is not English. But at the Calcutta Cup, the fact that man of the match Van der Merwe plied his trade in South Africa, rather than Scotland, went almost unnoticed. Your best compared to our best? Gradually, the Six Nations seem less about blood ties than enlisting guns for hire.
