The international merry-go-round continues. After the best part of a decade of striving for England honours Exeter Chiefs prop Alec Hepburn has suddenly decided he is now Scottish. Hepburn played for England U20, England Saxons and won full six caps in 2018 before he fell out of favour with Eddie Jones.
He follows in the footsteps of Australia flanker Jack Dempsey and England wing Ruaridh McConnochie who made the switch a couple of years ago invoking the new three-year stand down period introduced by World Rugby for players who can prove they have at least one grandparent born in their new nation. Having your cake and eating it too is the technical term.
The regulation was of course introduced to help the Pacific Island teams with many of their best qualified players trying their luck first with New Zealand or Australia only to be discarded and left twiddling their thumbs in terms of Test rugby. It always sounded fine in theory, fraught in practice, and as predicted in this column has been cynically abused by Tier 1 nations who suddenly see a short term fix to a problem and have the clout to persuade the player involved.
It’s wounding for international rugby and confusing – not to mention plain unfair – for Tier 2 nations who quite rightly believe that the eligibility regulations still massively favour the bigger T1 nations. T2 nations get hammered if they step out of line and make a genuine or minor mistake, T1 nations are actively encouraged to milk the system.
You also wonder in the long term how healthy this is for Scotland who also enthusiastically use the U20 teams of England and South Africa as quasi SRU development teams. Cameron Redpath, Sam Skinner, Ben White, Josh Bayliss and Arron Reed are all recent star members of the England U20 set up while Duhan Van der Merwe and Pierre Schoeman were likewise products of South Africa U20 and qualified only on residential grounds.
And what of Scotland U20? They slipped to a miserable third place in the second tier U20 Trophy competition last year behind Spain and Uruguay. They only get to play in the Six Nations U20 competition by virtue of their privileged protected position. If there was any justice or logic in the rugby world Spain would be taking their place this season. You can’t help thinking that Scotland would be better served directing more efforts towards developing their own talent rather than poaching that of others.
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