Scotland
The make-up and accents of the Scotland squad is a regular talking point – but is it such a big deal? Tom English explores the issue of player recruitment
THERE ISN’T a fisherman at sea with a net as big as the one used by Scotland when trawling the world looking for players who qualify for the national team. Every year seems to bring a new catch, the latest being a pair of props, the little-known Elliot Millar-Mills, who joined the squad in January by dint of his Scottish mum, and the more recognisable Alec Hepburn, who played six times for England and who is now back-up to Nelspruit’s Pierre Schoeman, because of his Scottish dad and World Rugby eligibility rules allowing the switch. Every team is entitled to tap into the ancestry rule and every team, pretty much, does. Scotland does it a lot. Does it matter? Not if you think the son of a Scot is perfectly entitled to consider himself Scottish, which most people would, surely? That’s how Kyle Steyn qualifies to play for Gregor Townsend’s team. The same for Ewan Ashman, Sam Skinner, Cam Redpath and others. Sione Tuipulotu, Ben White and Andy Christie have to go back a further generation to find their ancestry. Duhan van der Merwe, Schoeman and WP Nel have no Scottish blood in them at all, with all three qualifying on residency. There are nuances to this that some of those who like to mock the Jock Boks miss. Nel has spent 12 years in Scotland – a third of his life. Schoeman has been an Edinburgh resident for the last six years. Van der Merwe has played in Scotland in six of the last seven seasons. They can’t be fairly dismissed as day-trippers, can they? They’ve made a commitment. Good for them and good for Scotland. Everybody wins.
Of course, the way Scotland recruits its players has been a vexed business for the longest time. The big picture shows that fewer than half of Scotland’s World Cup squad in France could be accurately described as having come through the domestic set-up. Townsend’s squad has a player from Melbourne in the ranks but not one from Melrose, a player from Sydney but none from Selkirk, one from Johannesburg but not one from Jedburgh.
Nowhere in world rugby is the simple question ‘where do you come from?’ met with so many long answers, so much context than when you’re in amongst the Scotland rugby team. The list of birthplaces of the Scots who put England away in the Calcutta Cup for the fourth time in a row was quite something. Naturally, Edinburgh and Glasgow were represented. So, too, Stirling, Dundee and Perth. Then there was Stockport, Stoke, Exeter and Bristol in England; Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in Australia; Johannesburg, Nelspruit and George in South Africa; Toronto in Canada; Tipperary in Ireland and even Narbonne in France. One country and yet seven countries.
It’s easy to ridicule. The
