Ireland are by far the best team in the Six Nations so far, and wouldn’t you know it, people aren’t happy with Ireland due to their one or two foreign players in their ranks.
Telegraph’s chief sports writer Oliver Brown was writing in his piece this week and had a pop and the New Zealand born players in the Irish team ..
‌Even the Irish, heralded as the gold standard in everything they touch, know what it means to exploit rugby’s nebulous definitions of nationhood. Bundee Aki, James Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park are three players who have underpinned Ireland’s transformation into Grand Slam winners and, for a while, the world’s No 1-ranked side.
But all of them were integrated from New Zealand’s professional rugby system, targeted well into adulthood for moves to Ireland so that they could fulfil the residency rules. Lowe is about as Irish as McDonald’s Shamrock Shake, coming to the country when he was 25 and having played for the Maori All Blacks against the British and Irish Lions.
Here is a player who, on recognising in his mid-20s that he was never going to realise his All Black dreams, swapped Nelson for Dublin on the assurance that he would be wearing green three years later. The decision, while an emphatic success for his CV, casts an unflattering reflection on the romance of Test rugby.