Three Kiwis, two Aussies and what it means to be a British and Irish Lion

By Simon Smale, ABC

The British and Irish Lions squad makeup is always primed for controversy.

And yet, from a playing perspective, few can have many arguments about who was and wasn't selected for this year's tour.

However, there has still been significant discourse.

Jokes have been circulating on social media along the lines of: What do you call three Kiwis, two Aussies and two South Africans on a rugby pitch - the British and Irish Lions.

Several UK-based commentators, journalists and punters have also voiced significant displeasure based on where the players who have been selected were born and what that means on whether this is a true British and Irish Lions team.

First, some facts.

Of the 38 named players in the squad, nine were born outside the UK and Ireland, just under a quarter of the touring party.

This in itself is not unusual.

In a more modern, connected world, tying one's nationality to the nation of their birth is an increasingly nebulous concept.

For example, of those nine players born outside of the British Isles, Joe McCarthy was born in New York to Irish parents who returned with him to Ireland when he was three years old.

England's Marcus Smith, meanwhile, did not live in the UK until he was 13 years old, growing up in Singapore after being born in Manila, in the Philippines.

But then there are other examples.

Two players, Canberra-born Mack Hansen of Ireland and Melbourne's Sione Tuipulotu of Scotland, were born in Australia and even played for the Junior Wallabies, but because they have relatives from the British Isles - Hansen's mother is Irish and Tuipulotu has a Scottish grandmother - they are allowed to complete for those nations.

Then there's the project players.

Scotland pair Pierre Schoeman and Duhan van der Merwe were born in South Africa and Irish trio Jamison Gibson-Park, Bundee Aki and James Lowe were born in New Zealand.

None of those five players had any ties to their new nations before signing for club sides in the country.

When you consider just two Welsh players made the cut, that is a pretty high percentage.

How do the numbers stack up?

A quarter of players being born overseas may seem like quite a lot but, by World Rugby standards, it's pretty much par for the course.

The Wallabies have 49 players listed on the squad page of their website, 16 of whom were born overseas, almost a third.

Five of those players - Alex Hodgman (New Zealand), Filipo Daugunu (Fiji), Marika Koroibete (Fiji), Hunter Paisami (Samoa) and Will Skelton (Samoa) - played under 20 internationals for other nations.

Hodgman, meanwhile, played four full tests for the All Blacks before switching his allegiances, while Koroibete suited up seven times for Fiji's rugby league team.

Other nations are not immune to this trend either.

Of the 38 active squad members listed on the All Blacks' website, six players were born overseas, a shade over 15 percent - including former junior Wallaby Tyrel Lomax and Gold Coast-born Ethan de Groot.

At the other end of the spectrum, of the 42 squad members listed on the French Rugby Union website, just four (10 percent) were born overseas - not including the New Caledonian pair of Peato Mauvaka and Yoram Moefana.

The Springboks, meanwhile, list 52 squad members on their website, all of whom were born in South Africa, the last foreign-born player to represent the Springboks being Zimbabwe-born prop, Tendai 'The Beast' Mtawarira.

Over the last 120 years, Australia's population has become more diverse, increasingly urbanised, older and less likely to have children. That's according to new demographic data issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

According to the 2021 UK Office of National Statistics, 16.8 percent of people in England and Wales were born overseas, with that figure rising to 17.8 percent for Scotland.

European Union statistics agency Eurostat showed that 22 percent of the population of the Republic of Ireland was born overseas in 2023, while France has around 13 percent and Italy just under 11 percent.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed that 31.5 percent of Australians were born overseas and 28.8 percent of New Zealand's population was born overseas.

Interestingly, just 3.9 percent of South Africa's population was born overseas in 2023, according to Stats SA, while figures in Argentina suggest just 4.5 percent of its population was born overseas.

With those numbers, the make-up of the respective test teams makes a whole lot more sense.

The huge discrepancy in Scotland's data reflects that nation employing a programme, "The Scottish Qualified Programme," which is, according to the Scottish Rugby Website, "a player centred initiative designed to identify, develop and support Scottish Qualified players living outside of Scotland".

It should also be noted that nine of Scotland's 21 "foreign-born" players were born elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Eight of Wales' 12 were born outside Wales but inside the UK, and two of England's three were likewise born within the UK.

Italy's higher rate of players born overseas is likely a result of it lacking a significant domestic pathway akin to the others.

Is the lack of immigrants to Argentina and South Africa and therefore the lack of overseas-born Test players down to their relative geographical isolation from other rugby playing nations or for economic reasons?

For the record, at the 2023 Rugby World Cup Samoa (72.7 percent) and Tonga (62.1 percent) were packed with overseas-born talent - all 47 of them born in either New Zealand or Australia - while Fiji had just 12.5 percent of their squad from overseas-born players.

It could be reasonably said that nationality is not the same, narrowly defined feature it was a century ago.

Increased global travel has meant people travel for work opportunities all the time, meeting partners from different countries.

To cite a real-life scenario, Tom Lynagh, a player born in Italy to an Australian rugby legend and raised in England has now played for the Wallabies, while brother Louis played age-group rugby for England but made his senior international debut for Italy.

That is where it gets messy, a complexity that no matter of hand-wringing can sort - just ask world champion and Olympic track cycling medallist Matthew Richardson and his decision to move back to the UK - the land of his birth after years in the Australian system.

The issue is actually not where players are born. It is more where the players are developed.

What is far more of an issue is that there are Southern Hemisphere-born stars in the Lions squad who are so-called project players, expressly recruited to play for nations they had little or no prior connection to, qualifying under the three-year residency rule that was previously put in place by World Rugby.

That means, essentially, that you can play for a country you have lived in for three years, having previously had no ties to it.

Schoeman and van der Merwe both played for the Junior Springboks as they reached the final of the Junior World Championships in 2014 before taking up contract offers in Europe.

Then there are the Irish Kiwis, avowed project players who were recruited as if they were playing for a club side rather than a country.

Lowe and Gibson-Park are both capped players for the Māori All Blacks - Lowe even played for the Māori All Blacks in the unofficial fourth Test against the Lions in 2017 while Aki, despite never being an All Black of any guise, admitted in no uncertain terms that his move to Ireland was for the sole purpose of playing international rugby.

All up, in last year's Six Nations, 14 players qualified for their nations on residency grounds: Three from Scotland (Schoeman, van der Merwe and Tom Jordan), three from Ireland (Gibson-Park, Aki and Lowe), two from Wales (Christ Tshiunza and Taulupe Faletau), as well as five from France (Dany Priso, Uini Atonio, Giorgi Beria, Joshua Brennan and Emmanuel Meafou) and one from Italy (Montanna Ioane).

Of those 14, five completed their residency requirements as children, making it a not unreasonable suggestion they had no say in their move to a new country.

The other nine - Ioane, Schoemann, Jordan, van der Merwe, Gibson-Park, Aki, Lowe, Atonio and Meafou - all qualified in their 20s as professional players.

Ex-Wallaby Anthony Abrahams, who also gained credence for his stand against playing apartheid-era South Africa, wrote about his objections to the "naked pillaging" of players from the Southern Hemisphere on The Roar, describing such players as "mercenaries".

"In their zeal to stack their teams, the main Northern offenders have entirely lost sight of what a 'national' team means," Abrahams wrote in his emotively charged piece.

"In rugby terms, 'nationality' reflects the collective endeavour of a nation; the year-on-year school and club Saturday rugby games; the weekly contests in outlying farming districts, Indigenous rugby groups; the investment in development. Home grown players are deeply immersed in this process.

"Nationality is not a Scottish or Irish scout, waving a cheque in front of a Southern player's face and promising an El Dorado to entice him to change countries."

That three-year requirement has since been upped to five years of continual registration with a union or rugby body or 10 years of cumulative residency thanks to the urging of ex-Argentinian international, Augustine Pichot.

In its list of the regulations, World Rugby states that the regulation is in place, "to ensure that players selected to represent [a country] have a genuine, close, credible and established national link with the country of the union for which they have been selected".

"Such national link is essential to maintain the unique characteristics and culture of elite international sporting competition between unions."

All three of the Irish New Zealanders have had Irish citizenship conferred upon them in the last year or so, with Aki in particular praised for his contribution to Galway in his role as a Connacht player. Both the others play in Dublin for Leinster.

It makes it hard to argue that they haven't developed a "close" national link.

So what does that mean for the Lions?

Overseas-born players are not alien to the Lions set-up.

The Lions have had squad members from as far afield as Russia (Prince Alexander Obolensky), Israel (Jamie Heaslip and Brendan Mullin), Kenya (Simon Shaw), Zambia (Dafydd James), India (Andy Mulligan and Nick Jeavons), Malaysia (Tony Underwood), Egypt (Graham Price) and Germany (Paul Ackford), among others.

And there have been more than a handful of Aussies who have worn a Lions jersey.

Indeed, Tuipulotu and Hansen are the seventh and eighth Australian-born players to have been picked for the Lions.

Geelong-born Alec Timms, a former Geelong Football Club (Victorian Rules) player, appeared for the Lions in 1899 after he moved to Edinburgh to complete his medical degree, winning 14 caps for the Scots and three more for the Lions.

Tom Richards, the son of a Cornish miner, was born in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales and ended up being a touring Wallaby to the British Isles in 1908 as well as a Queensland legend. While working in South Africa later in his life, he was drafted into the Lions team that played the Springboks in 1910.

Melbourne-born, New Zealand-raised and Oxford University-educated Ian Smith (1924) is another who progressed to play for the Lions.

Junior Wallaby Brent Cockbain (2005), ex-North Sydney Bear Nathan Hines (2009) and former shot put prospect Tom Court (2013) have all suited up for the Lions having been born in Australia.

There can, reasonably, be questions asked of the flow of project players to the richer northern unions, a flow that threatened to become a flood, weakening the foundations of the unions that have produced them.

That flow has since slowed somewhat with the new eligibility rules.

But perhaps, as the most heavily criticised players have found, home is where the heart is.

And come July, that heart will be beating for the Lions.

-ABC