Sport
France and England are supporting moves to make it harder to recruit foreign rugby players.
France and England are supporting moves to make it harder to recruit foreign rugby players.
t’s too early to break out the champagne, but there are signs England and France, the biggest, richest and most ruthlessly selfinterested members of the international rugby community, are starting to see the big picture.
Bernard Laporte, the former national coach who’s now president of the French Rugby Federation, has declared that, from here on, only French passport holders can play for France. Rugby currently has a three-year residency rule; qualifying for a French passport requires five years’ continuous residence, plus familiarity with the language and culture.
Laporte campaigned for the presidency on a platform of reducing the foreign influence in both the national team and French club rugby, but he’s presenting the measure as a bid to restore integrity to international competition: “One must not impoverish the Fijians, Georgians, Samoans and Tongans, otherwise we impoverish the standards of international rugby.” The French side that played the All Blacks last November had two Fijian wingers and giant Timaru-born prop Uini Atonio, a product of the Counties-Manukau Rugby Academy.
This is a classic case of poacher turned gamekeeper in that, as French coach, Laporte was one of the pioneers of the now-widespread Northern Hemisphere practice of shoehorning foreigners into the national team. His recruits included Rotorua-born Tony Marsh, who won Super Rugby championships with the Blues and Crusaders before heading to France.
Meanwhile, England rugby boss Ian Ritchie says his union will support a proposal to extend the qualification period to five years and may unilaterally adopt five-year residency if the push doesn’t succeed. When England played Fiji late last year, the English team included two Fijians, one of whom, Nathan Hughes, was a Kelston Boys’ High old boy.
Ritchie, a former Wimbledon chief executive, hasn’t been noted for his generosity or altruism since becoming a rugby administrator. When the cash-strapped Fiji Rugby Union asked for a £150,000 slice of the expected £10 million revenue from the England-Fiji game at Twickenham, Ritchie blew them off, saying, “It’s not England’s responsibility to help fund world rugby.” Eventually, he slipped the Fijians £75,000 and told the media how grateful they were.
He dismissed New Zealand’s longrunning campaign for a share of the enormous revenues the All Blacks generate when they tour Europe by telling New Zealand Rugby to “go and build a bigger stadium”, advice that suggests he hadn’t bothered acquainting himself with this country’s demographics, finances,
geography or politics.
Getting the big two on board is a boost for World Rugby vicechairman Agustín Pichot’s campaign for five-year
residency, but there’s no guarantee it will carry the day when put to the vote in May. As Ritchie admits, England is coming at the issue “from the position of a large playing base, as is France, and a large number of people to select from”.
According to a 2014 World Rugby survey, England has about 340,000 registered players and an overall pool of two million players; France has 291,000 registered players.
Bitter opposition can be expected from the Celtic countries – Ireland, Scotland and Wales – and Italy, who have smaller playing bases, produce fewer international-class players and look to plug the gaps in their national teams by recruiting foreigners. Italy has 82,000 registered players; Scotland just 49,000. (New Zealand has 148,000.)
Complicating the issue is the onecountry rule: once you’ve represented one country, you cannot transfer allegiance to another, regardless of residency or ancestry. This restriction was apparently driven by South Africa with the aim of cutting off the flow of Samoans into the All Blacks. As with Ritchie, the South Africans obviously didn’t do their homework.