Rugby: Wales fiasco creates leek that needs plugging

By CHRIS LAIDLAW

Someone ought to make a movie out of this. Perhaps the title could be Plugging a Leek in the Family Tree.

Jim Carrey would naturally play the lead as Shane Howarth, the Kiwi hero who ransacks the upper valleys of Wales for evidence of the long-lost grand-daddy.

The pronouncement by the Welsh Rugby Union that Howarth and his co-conspirator, Brett Sinkinson, are guilty of illicitly masquerading as Welshmen until proven innocent by the production of a grandparent's birth certificate, is worthy material for high farce.

It reveals, as if further evidence was needed, the blundering nature of the International Rugby Board, which has decreed all this.

Listening to Vernon Pugh, the Welsh chairman of the IRB, trying to put a rational gloss on it is like listening to someone from Winz telling us how to administer student loans.

Surely the IRB can come up with something a bit more cooperative than requiring anybody who opts for one country over that of his birth to produce hard-copy evidence of his ancestry?

Like asking a Maori for written evidence of his or her whakapapa, it often just can't be done. Is the IRB asking Andrew McCormick for a piece of paper that testifies to his Japanese ancestry? Andrew's dad, Fergie, might have a bit of a problem with that one. Stand by for an international incident.

The whole business of who gets to play for what country needs to be sorted out. A workable but still flexible arrangement that allows for movement, but which requires a commitment to a single country, is sorely needed.

At the moment we have a more or less open season for mercenaries. There is heavy traffic in players heading in all directions. Pacific Islanders are fleeing the impoverishment of their own unions in search of riches in Australia and New Zealand and opting for local eligibility.

Needless to say, this serves New Zealand and Australia rather well but it permanently cripples the game in Samoa, Tonga and Fiji.

Legions of players from just about everywhere are beating a path to the doors of the cash-rich Japanese companies who run rugby, and much the same is happening in Italy, who rushed an Argentine into their national team with indelicate haste.

What to do? The simplest solution is to restrict eligibility to one's country of birth, as the Home Unions in Britain used to do. There should be little or no restriction on players appearing for clubs or provinces in foreign countries, but country of origin should be the rule for international representation.

In that way there can be no confusion. We will not witness the ridiculous spectacle of players tracing a fanciful ancestry through the files of some distant register of births, deaths and marriages in a country with which they have no emotional or material affiliation.

It is, after all, a bit easier to produce your own birth certificate than that of the mythical grand-daddy.