Picking ‘foreign' players for the Lions leaves a sour taste

Telegraph

09-05-2025

On a bleak, damp Rotorua evening, the setting for a tour match against the Maori All Blacks, the British and Irish Lions had every reason to be wary of the opposing full-back, so athletically gifted that he had already represented New Zealand Under-15s in basketball.
The year was 2017, and the player was James Lowe. Except 26 months and one Leinster contract later, Lowe was on the cusp, courtesy of World Rugby's then three-year residency rule, of eligibility for Ireland. 'It's a stupid rule,' he said at the time. 'I could dig myself a big hole here, but it's weird that I could be Irish, isn't it?'
Today he confronts an even stranger reality. For eight years on from performing the ferocious 'Timatanga', the Maori All Black version of the haka, in front of Warren Gatland's Lions, Lowe is heading back to the southern hemisphere wearing red himself.
One of the most powerful moments of the 2017 Tour 🙌
Always a pleasure to come up against the Maori All Blacks. #LionsRugby pic.twitter.com/y7dZ7ObmF1
— British & Irish Lions (@lionsofficial) March 15, 2021
This is the moment when the plasticity of nationality in rugby union suddenly becomes all too real. While flags of convenience are now part of the Six Nations tapestry, with Scotland fielding 15 foreign-born players in a 38-man squad this year, the powderkeg risks exploding for the Lions.
The venerated red jersey, after all, has acquired an almost mythical status, standing as the pinnacle to which any British or Irish player can aspire. If ever a shirt captures the essential principle in international sport of your best versus our best, it is this.
And yet Farrell has just picked a Lions squad containing more Kiwis than Welshmen. Jac Morgan and Tomos Williams found themselves outnumbered by a trio born and raised in New Zealand: Lowe, Bundee Aki and Jamison Gibson-Park. This was in addition to two Australians, Mack Hansen and Sione Tuipulotu, and two South Africans transplanted to Scotland, Pierre Schoeman and Duhan van der Merwe – both of whom represented the Junior Springboks, the Under-20 side in their native land.
There was nothing quite so bizarre at the announcement ceremony, ahead of a tour Down Under, than to see the presenters cross live for the reaction of Hansen, speaking in an Australian accent broader than those of most Wallabies.
Lowe, likewise, is a curious case. Playing both for and against the Lions is among the rarest feats. The only true equivalent of Lowe's achievement belongs to Riki Flutey, who switched sides in an even shorter time, turning out as a replacement for Wellington in a provincial match against Clive Woodward's Lions in 2005 before being called up, on the back of three years living in England, for the 2009 tour of South Africa.
The selection sparked much muttering about Flutey being a gun for hire, especially as he moved to France a couple of months later to play his club rugby in Brive.
Flutey was a Lions outlier, though: of the team that played in Durban, the one Test he started, he was the only player born overseas. This time, the make-up is radically different. Of those bidding to face the Wallabies in Brisbane on July 19, it is not just Lowe who traces his origins elsewhere, but potentially almost the entire back line.
Just imagine it: a decisive attack sparked at scrum-half by Gibson-Park, another former Maori All Black owing his Irishness to his three years at Leinster, before spinning out to Aki, who was working as a bank teller in Auckland before resurrecting his career at Connacht, and then finished out wide by Lowe, the Nelson native who has described his relocation to the Emerald Isle as a purely pragmatic choice.
'Obviously, it was a dream for me to play for the All Blacks, being a kid from New Zealand,' he said in 2019. 'But then you get to a stage where you've got to park dreams and think of opportunity.'
That is his prerogative, of course. And yet you wonder if this type of outlook dilutes the gravitas of a Lions tour, with its brothers-in-arms credo and its narrative of four proud nations taking on the rest of the world. Van der Merwe, embarking on his second tour, claims to be imbued with the spirit of the Lions, insisting that the experience in 2021 was the defining summer of his life.
While you cannot doubt his sincerity, the romance of the story fades a little when you hear Schoeman say: 'For us, if it's not going to happen in South Africa, you might as well go to Scotland.'
It is not blood-and-soil nationalism to feel uneasy about what is happening here. Gibson-Park, Aki and Lowe, the three most direct beneficiaries of World Rugby's lax attitude to residency, are all highly likely to be Test starters in Australia.
Agustin Pichot, in his time as vice-chairman of the global governing body, often lambasted the effects of stipulating that 'project players' only had to live for three years in their adopted countries. 'It's very important to keep the identity of our national teams,' he said. 'As a cultural thing, as an inspiration to new kids, having players on your team who have not lived for long in the nations they are representing, I think it's not right.'
Even so, the issue never ceases to be provocative. I recall, having dared to question the extent of Aki's Irishness last year, sparking a fierce debate, with many Ireland fans bristling that the centre had raised four children in the country and that he belted out the national anthem with tears streaming down his face. None of which can be denied. But this still does not counter the argument that eligibility by residency is, in many ways, an inelegant, expedient arrangement.
CJ Stander, once chosen to train with the Springboks, was also hailed as an icon of Irish rugby, a fearsome No 8 who became a Lion in 2017. No sooner did he retire, however, than he headed straight home to South Africa to live in the Western Cape. Daniel Leo, the Samoan forward, accused Stander of 'making a mockery of the game'.
At a time when the Lions are still striving for fresh relevance, to assert their position not as an anachronism but as a true cultural phenomenon, it is peculiar that they are fleshing out their squad for Australia with players who have no British or Irish lineage at all. For the inescapable upshot is that there are spectacular home-grown talents who miss out.
Darcy Graham, for example, is losing the potential opportunity of a lifetime because of the inclusion of Ireland's Residency Three. It never needed to be this way. World Rugby has accepted as much, raising the residency threshold for representing national unions from three years to five from last August.
But the change has come too late to prevent several players from squeezing into Farrell's squad via the more controversial route. For a concept as hallowed and as wedded to national identities as the Lions, such a short-cut leaves the sourest taste.