Israel Folau has been erased from Australian rugby history

Telegraph

5 days ago

In a less febrile atmosphere, Israel Folau could have been a feature of this British and Irish Lions tour Down Under. At 36, he might have struggled to make as indelible an impact as in 2013, when he combined the sublime and the ridiculous, scoring two tries in the first Test before finding himself carried upside-down on George North's back in the second.
But he still wanted to face the Lions once more, putting his hand up for selection in the Australia and New Zealand invitational XV in Adelaide. The problem was that he had become a persona non grata, a toxic liability to whom Rugby Australia had no wish to extend even a token life-raft.
The erasure of Folau is one of the strangest and most sorrowful in the nation's sporting history. Here, rugby union has toiled for too long to attract marquee names, lavishing £2.5m on Joseph Suaalii in the hope that he could inspire better than a 2-0 deficit in this three-Test series.
Folau, though, was a bona fide superstar, an athlete so gifted that he achieved the almost unheard-of distinction of headlining all three of Australia's contact football codes. That, sadly, was before the explosion of social media, which afforded him such a dangerous outlet for his fundamentalist Christian beliefs that it would end up destroying his career.
It was a single Instagram message that sparked Folau's self-immolation. The day after the Tasmanian parliament passed a law in 2019 allowing gender to be changed on birth certificates, Folau posted a screenshot of a meme crudely paraphrasing the First Epistle to the Corinthians: 'Warning: Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers, Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolators. Hell awaits you – repent! Only Jesus saves.'
At a time when Australia had only just legalised gay marriage, Folau's intimation that all gay people were heading for eternal damnation provoked a savage backlash at all levels of RA, eventually costing the jobs of chief executive Raelene Castle, Wallabies head coach Michael Cheika, and their most talented player.
In some ways, they have never quite recovered. Australia, suffering from an advanced case of Folau fatigue, were torpid at the 2019 World Cup, thrashed by England in the quarter-finals. 'We had the very best full-back in the world,' lamented Samu Kerevi. 'And he wasn't there.'
Four years later, deprived of anybody even approaching Folau's pedigree, they outdid themselves, flaming out in the pool stage.
Today, with their future precarious, Folau retreats ever further into professional obscurity, compelled to pursue his ambitions away from his homeland. While plying his trade at club level for Japan's Urayasu D-Rocks, he has shifted national allegiance from Australia to Tonga courtesy of paternal ancestry. Refusing to disavow his hardline religious convictions, Folau has, as a consequence, been excommunicated.
The central question is whether the punishment fits the crime. While Folau's post was incendiary and deeply upsetting to some, did it truly warrant the indefinite cancellation of a man who appeared in 73 Tests, winning the John Eales Medal a record three times as the finest Australian player?
Sekope Kepu, his former team-mate with Australia, reflected recently: 'The saddest thing for me is that they almost scrub his name out. You never hear people acknowledging what a special player he was. It's like he didn't play for the Wallabies.'
It is hardly as if his peers have suffered the same fate. Michael Hooper, his former captain, is working as a pitchside commentator for the Lions Tests, while David Pocock has moved into politics, winning election in 2022 as a senator in Canberra.
But Folau exists in exile, his body of work all but expunged. That is an extraordinary price to pay for a lapse that essentially amounted to the expression of a sincerely-held view. And it was one shared, whether we like it not, by many with the same heritage.
As Taniela Tupou, called up as the Wallabies' tighthead for the third Test against the Lions on Saturday, said in response to the termination of Folau's contract: 'Seriously, might as well sack me and all the Pacific Island players, because we have the same Christian beliefs.'
The open wound of the Folau affair illuminates a wider tension in Australia between the forces of conservatism and institutions' desperate desire to be heralded as inclusive. When the plebiscite on same-sex marriage was ordered in 2017, RA effectively imposed a three-line whip that the Wallabies should back a 'yes' vote, even unveiling a rainbow logo.
And yet for all the vocal backing of certain players– with Pocock even delaying his wedding to wife Emma until the yes campaign succeeded – others were uncomfortable with an approach that they regarded as akin to coerced thought. Kerevi claimed that the governing body had never asked him or team-mates with Islander backgrounds how they felt.
Ultimately, Folau became radicalised. He was not always inclined towards fire-and-brimstone sermons: indeed, in 2014, he appeared on the front cover of a Sydney magazine promoting the Bingham Cup, a biennial gay rugby tournament.
But a combination of RA's stance and the influence of his father Eni, a devout pastor seduced by the rantings of American evangelist Gino Jennings – a figure who once declared that 'Christ and same-sex marriage ain't got nothing in common' – tilted him dramatically in the opposite direction. By 2018, when asked by a fan about God's plan for gay people, he replied: 'Hell – unless they repent their sins and turn to God.'
It would be a stretch to depict Folau as a martyr in any of this, despite his supporters' best efforts to do so. On the very day the Wallabies were bundled out of the 2019 World Cup, he was on stage at the Australian Christian Lobby's annual conference, paraded as a rock star.
On several occasions, however, he has been his own worst enemy. How credible, for example, is his insistence that his remarks about the gay community come from a 'place of love', when he is pronouncing them as destined for perdition?
During the terrible bushfires of late 2019, he did himself few favours with his comment that the infernos were a result of allowing gay marriage and decriminalising abortion. Even Scott Morrison, the then prime minister and a Pentecostal Christian who grew up in the church, called Folau's intervention 'appallingly insensitive'.
Plus, Folau had a potential escape route. To protect his international future, he could have acquiesced in his employers' demand to delete his offending Instagram meme about homosexuality. But he refused, convinced by his father that to remove the post would be to remove the word of God.
As such, a potentially great Wallaby was left with nowhere to go, cast adrift on the basis of the offensive terms in which he couched his religious fervour. The conundrum was whether this constituted unfair dismissal. Folau certainly thought so, pursuing RA through the courts until accepting an estimated £3.1m settlement.
And perhaps he had a point. For the unpalatable truth is that athletes in Australia have done worse and continued competing at the highest level: look at the plethora of domestic violence cases in rugby league, or the 2013 Essendon drugs scandal in Australian Rules football, which culminated only in short-term suspensions for 34 players.
Folau's fate, by contrast, has proved terminal: the moment he pressed 'send' on that infamous message was the moment he signed a decree absolute in his divorce from Australian rugby.
One partial mitigation is that he is nothing if not consistent. Where some twist in the wind in response to outside pressure, Folau tends to hold firm. Take the position he adopted during his first post-Wallabies chapter at the Catalans Dragons in 2020, where he refused to take a knee as part of the Black Lives Matter protests.
'He will only kneel for one person – his God,' one club insider said. His decision to reject such an inherently cosmetic, superficial gesture turned out to be prescient.
But the fallout from his other declarations of faith have left him permanently on the periphery. If his achievements have been airbrushed, then that is because RA would prefer to forget that the entire dismal episode ever happened.
Whatever you may think of Folau, he has been disowned because of how starkly his religious outlook sits at odds with Wallabies' supposedly progressive philosophy. This, by any standard, is a worrying precedent to set.