THE international merry- goround 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 pe- riod 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 inter- national rugby and confus- ing - not to mention plain unfair - for Tier 2 nations who quite rightly believe that the eligibility regula- tions still massively favour the bigger T1 nations. T2 nations get hammered if they step out of
