Eligibility rules bane of rugby

A Kiwi, two South Africans, a Samoan and an Englishman walk into a bar

. . . two drinks later and they end up playing rugby for Ireland.

If only it were a bad joke rather than a semi-accurate representation of the truth, but it will be the former only when rugby’s governing body is prepared to have a grown-up discussion about eligibility.

They will say they have already had it because next year the threeyear residency rule will be extended to five.

That will mean that the legions of South Africans who turn up in European club rugby these days — men such as Jean Kleyn who qualified as Irish one month ago and is now heading to the World Cup — will have to wait five years before they can play test football for the country in which they are based.

And with the residency law fixed, there will be those who say everything is fixed as it has been the weak spot — the area in which the unscrupulous have had the most mileage in plugging gaps in their squad by pinching players developed by others.

When Agustin Pichot came into the job as World Rugby deputy chairman, he made eligibility, but more specifically the residency law, one of his priorities to fix, because he felt many national unions were using it to exploit an increasingly transient labour force being pulled around the world by club contracts.

As proof, this year the Six Nations featured 22 players who had qualified for their respective nations on the three-year residency rule.

That number has been as high as 38 in previous seasons and it’s been creeping up in the Rugby Championship, too, as both New Zealand and Australia regularly have a handful of residency-qualified players such as Waisake Naholo, Sevu Reece, Ofa Tuungafasi, Vaea Fifita and Shannon Frizell.

To some, the heavy presence of residency-qualified players in international squads is a reflection of a hyper mobile world where nonrugby factors such as education, employment and familial pull take people all over the globe. But for others, certainly Pichot, the volumes are reflective of a distorted mind-set within some national unions who have come to believe that test players can be bought off the peg from other countries.

And this is why eligibility is such a vexed and emotive issue because both views are valid and for every migrant that washes up in a test jersey as a result of wider socioeconomic factors, there is usually another who has been deliberately targeted once they have surfaced on the professional scene.

But up until now rugby hasn’t wanted to differentiate. It has not been possible in law to make a distinction between those drawn to a new country by factors such as education, employment or familial pull compared with those who move on the basis of being offered a professional club contract that comes with the virtual promise that a test jersey awaits three years down the track.

Not all residency qualifications are the same and there must surely be acceptance that the Tuungafasi family migrating from Tonga to Mangere in 2005 in the hope of building a better life for their 11 children is not the same as Ireland identifying the potential of 22-yearold Chiefs midfielder Bundee Aki and giving him a clear indication that if he joined Connacht, he’d be a great chance to make the national team once eligible.

David Pocock is Zimbabwean-born but his family fled to Australia for their own safety when he was in his teens.

He plays for the Wallabies under the residency rule, in the same way that South African-born Josh Strauss played for Scotland at the last World Cup, picked in the squad even though he wouldn’t become eligible until after the tournament started.

The Scots worked out that if he stayed for three years once they snapped him up after the Lions were kicked out of Super Rugby in 2013, Strauss would be eligible the day after the 2015 World Cup started.

Strauss and Aki are known as ‘‘Project Players’’, signed on contracts which make no specific promises nor do they provide financial incentives to switch allegiance, but there is a nudge-nudge, wink sort of agreement where it’s made clear that if they come over, play club rugby and go okay, they will be in the frame to play test rugby for their adopted country.

The loophole may have been closed, but it’s inevitable that nations desperate to bolster their squads will find new ways to circumnavigate the rules and eligibility will continue to demand more attention.