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John Campbell: Blatant self-interest of rugby's elite leaving Pacific depleted

Tonga perform their pre-match haka ahead of the rugby union Test match - All Blacks v Tonga played at FMG Stadium Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand on Saturday 7 September 2019. Copyright photo: © Bruce Lim / www.photosport.nz

OPINION:  In one of the great games of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, Tonga defeated France by 19 to 14.

France went on to the final, losing to the All Blacks by a narrower margin.

Tonga returned to their stumbling disappointments, punctuated, very occasionally (as if a window into what might be), by the sublime.

At the beginning of July, a few weeks shy of 10 years on from that magical game, and despite World Rugby’s endless repetition of its “global sport” mantra, a “depleted” (the euphemism currently being used) Tongan side lost by 102 points to the All Blacks. For anyone who loves rugby, there is nothing good to be said for that. Nothing at all.

But Rugby, with a capital R, allows this to happen. World Rugby, based in Dublin — and the Tier One nations who control it, and who frequently mask their pungent self-interest as being good for the game.

To understand this, it’s helpful to go back four years to a weekend in late 2017 to four test matches and to one player’s international debut.

In the second half of Australia’s game against Scotland at Murrayfield in Edinburgh, on Saturday, November 25 2017, before a capacity crowd enraptured by Scotland’s unprecedented supremacy over the visitors, a 21-year-old named Taniela Tupou came off the bench to makes his debut for the Wallabies.

Tupou is sometimes referred to as the 'Tongan Thor'. And his journey from schoolboy rugby in Tonga to the Australian national side tells us much about how the power imbalances in international rugby.

Yes, the Cinderella dream is alive and well. But when you’re from Tonga, or Samoa, or Fiji, the glass slipper awaits you in other countries.

Tupou started his rugby life as a child in Tonga before he played for Tonga College where he was picked to tour New Zealand with the Tongan Under 14 team. These age grade tours from the Pacific offer such an efficient delivery service for New Zealand secondary schools that they should be sponsored by Uber Eats.

Duly receiving a scholarship to Sacred Heart College in Auckland, scoring three tries in 20 televised minutes against Kelston Boys High, becoming an internet “sensation”, then eventually crossing the Tasman to Oz.

To understand why Tupou was in Edinburgh playing for Australia, all you had to do on that Saturday in 2017 was travel a few hours south to London.

There, on exactly the same day, Manu Samoa were playing England. The timing was exquisite.

If anyone was idly wondering why a young man known as 'Tongan Thor' was making his debut for a country he’d only moved to three years earlier and whose National Anthem he’d only finished learning that morning, the Samoan players at Twickenham could have told them.

The match fee, per player, for the Manu Samoa team was £650 (NZ$1,282.55).  And for the already highly paid players in the England team they were up against? It was £22,000 (NZ$43,409) a man.

Let’s consider that. The were 81,911 people in attendance at Twickenham for the game.

Working on an average of only £50 (NZ$98) per ticket, that’s gate revenue of somewhere in the region of £4,450,000 (NZ$8,780,530).

Even allowing for Samoa’s entire 30-man squad to each receive the match fee of £650 (NZ$1,282.55), that’s a total of £19,500 (NZ$38,476.50) - or roughly 0.43 per cent of the gate. If you think that’s laughable, it is. All the way to the bank.

There was something obdurate about this. Something deaf.

In the run-up to the game, the contrasting match fees had been widely publicised. And it was suggested by England’s brilliant loosehead prop, Mako Vunipola (whose father, Feʻao Vunipola, had played for Tonga in the 1995 and 1999 Rugby World Cups, and moved to Wales after signing with Pontypool RFC in 1998), that the English players donate some of their fees to the Samoan team.

Tonga's Maama Vaipulu and teammates react after the All Blacks score.

But on the Wednesday before the test, The Guardian reported: “England’s players have opted against donating a proportion of their £22,000 (NZ$43,409.40) match fee to their Samoa counterparts because doing so would compromise rugby union’s integrity”.

Ah, integrity. Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t.

It was a weekend full of such “integrity”. A weekend in which Samoan players earned 2.95 per cent of the match fee being paid to their English opponents.

A weekend in which the idea that this might be remedied, in even an ad hoc fashion, was dismissed as undermining rugby’s values.

It was a weekend in which a man widely called 'Tongan', having been a Tongan Under 14 rep so promising that Tonga couldn’t possibly hope to retain him (and the only question was which Tier One nation would tie him up) was making his debut for Australia.

And a weekend in which, as fate and the international window would have it, the Tongan national side themselves weren’t too far away - in Bucharest, playing Romania.

What a midfield was on display in that game: Sione Faka’osilea at 12, Paula Kinikinilau at 13, and Fonovai Tangimana outside them on the wing. All of them born in Tonga, all of them playing for Romania against Tonga.

Integrity, eh? For some it means £22,000 (NZ$43,409.40) a pop to pay at home. For others it means earning a living by travelling 16,000 kilometres to play for clubs in Romania, and then for Romania against the country of your birth.

That same weekend, by the way, the All Blacks were playing Wales in Cardiff.

Representing Wales was Tangaki Taulupe 'Toby' Faletau, born in Tonga, but raised in Wales, after his father, Tongan international, Kuli Faletau, went to Wales to play rugby when the game turned professional.

The All Blacks, meanwhile, fielded Fijian-born Waisake Naholo, Samoan-born Nepo Laulala, and Tongan-born Ofa Tu'ungafasi.

Sam Whitelock makes a run against Tonga.

It’s important to tell the whole story here.

The 2018 Census reminds us that there are more than 380,000 people, from over 30 distinct Pacific groups, living in New Zealand.

Auckland is the largest Polynesian city in the world - and shines because of it.

The story of how Tu’ungafasi came to be a New Zealander is a classic example of Pasifika migration in the past few decades.

But that doesn’t alter the fact that everything about rugby’s professional model not only incentivises people who’ve moved to a Tier One country to represent that country (rather than the country of their birth, childhood, and even, as if with Taniela Tupou national age-grade honours), it also vacuums them out of Tier Two nations, particularly in the Pacific.

Want to make a living playing rugby? Leave.

And having left, it’s difficult, costly and/or even impossible to return.

Sometimes this can stagger into the realm of the absurd.

In February 2018, for example, Britain’s The Times newspaper ran a story headlined: Hands off our Tongans, say Welsh rugby teams.

I’m not making this up.

The article was about the fact English clubs and schools were stealing Tongan players from Wales.

"A number of Tongans have emerged from Gwent after exiles settled there in the 1990s and early 2000s to play professionally for local clubs.

"Now the Dragons, a Newport-based regional team, are growing increasingly frustrated that players are being lured away by scholarships worth up to £30,000 (NZ$59,194.60) at prestigious English schools.”

The “exiles” referred to were Tongan players who’d moved to Wales for professional rugby contracts.

That Tongan clubs and schools might once have felt exactly the same sense of frustration at not being able to afford to retain these players when Wales had come calling, and that England were only doing a version of what Wales had earlier done, made it a story rich with irony.

“Rich” being the operative word, of course. The richer you are, the more irony you can afford.

The Times gave an example. It will be familiar to anyone who’s read this far: “The path was first trodden by Mako and Billy Vunipola, sons of Fe’ao, a former Tonga player who settled in Gwent. The boys grew up in the Pontypool area but moved east and are now stars of the England team.”

Poor old Wales, eh? Imagine.

And then, having given irony a nice glass of champagne and a deck chair with a sweeping view, The Times tells us:
“Offspring of the Tongan settlers have been coming of age in Welsh junior ranks but players have been snapped up by schools such as Sedbergh and Caldicott and the fear among Welsh officials is that they will be lost to England for good.

Bernard Jackman, head coach of the Dragons, said: “We’re losing kids hand over fist on scholarships. You’re never going to have a group of Tongan kids like that who are Welsh again, it’s once in a lifetime, but English schools come in and get them on scholarships, then they’re gone. They’re on full bursaries, so how can you compete with that?”

Indeed. How can you? And that’s a question that takes us back to Tonga’s 0 – 102 loss to the All Blacks.

On the 3rd of July, in the leadup to that game, Stuff ran an article by Aaron Goile, under the headline: International men of mystery — just who are these Tongans facing the All Blacks?

It was a fair question. And the story began with a striking fact: “All Blacks captain Sam Whitelock: 122 test caps. The Tongan matchday 23: 120.”

In part, that spoke of how few tests Tonga gets, relative to the All Blacks, but it also spoke of the fact that some of Tonga’s most well-known players simply weren’t available.

Of course, Tonga’s inability to actually field a proper test team against New Zealand was compounded by Covid-19.

Toutai Kefu was forced to field 13 debutants in last night’s Test against the All Blacks, with his best players unable to make the journey to New Zealand.

But even that’s because nearly every Tongan and Samoan rugby player earning their living from the game is somewhere other than in Tonga and Samoa.

It’s worth observing that Covid-19 only means you can’t get your players home if they aren’t at home to start with.

That’s not a problem for New Zealand or England. But it’s a crisis if you’re a Tier Two nation whose players are scattered to every corner of the rugby playing world.

Returning to that 2018 article from The Times, which contains a brilliantly evocative paragraph: “Players from the Pacific Islands — chiefly Tonga, Samoa and Fiji — have become the great wandering tribes of global rugby, unable to make a living as professionals in their home nations, so moving abroad to wealthier countries and often qualifying for their adopted countries.”

It’s hard to measure the extent of this diaspora, or export industry (or “farm”, as my friend and colleague Adrian Stevanon calls it), but the Pacific Rugby Players Welfare organisation (PRPW), led by the redoubtable Daniel Leo (whose own documentary on this subject is a must watch), tells us that “over 600 players of Pacific Island heritage now play throughout the European leagues - from the Top 14 & Premiership to National 3 & Fédérale 3.”

Six-hundred players, from highly professional to semi-professional.

That’s somewhere in the region of three times the total number of players contracted to New Zealand’s Super Rugby teams.

Or, as Richard Knowler pointed out in Stuff: “Tonga, Samoa and Fiji supply about 20 percent of the world’s professional rugby players.”

Twenty per cent of the world’s professional rugby players, and World Rugby Rankings of 15th, 13th and 11th, respectively.

I started to write this on the Sunday morning after the Tonga – All Blacks game.

And then, on Monday, I saw Jim Kayes retweet something from the Chiefs: “BREAKING - Samisoni Taukei’aho has been called up to the @AllBlacks squad as injury cover! Congrats! #ChiefsMana”

Wonderful. But as Jim Kayes pointed out: “This is great for the player but highlights again the plight of the PI teams. He captained Tonga U15s.” And he did.

Indeed, Taukei'aho toured New Zealand as captain of Tonga's Under-15s, just as Tupou had first come to these shores with the Under-14s, and, having been “scouted” (he was so good he was hard to miss), he moved to St Paul's Collegiate in Hamilton on an international scholarship.

No part of me begrudges the players this.

If the choice is between life as a near-amateur, with few games, few sponsors, and little ability to support your family or build any kind of financial security, or wealth, the ability to provide for your family, business class travel, flash gear, expensive hotels and TV commercials, only saints like Jack Lam would even consider opting for the former.

Samisoni Taukei'aho

But every rugby loving part of me begrudges the fact World Rugby does so little to help Tier Two nations meaningfully respond to this.

Imagine when Taukei’aho told his Tongan age-grade coaches that they were losing him because he’d received a scholarship offer from New Zealand.

They countered with… what? “Stick with us, Samisoni. If you make it, you’ll earn nothing, hardly ever play, have no games at all in 2020. But then, in 2021, although only if Italy pulls out of touring New Zealand, you can pay your own MIQ fees and play with some amateurs and low-paid professionals in a one-side annihilation by New Zealand. That’s if you’re not stranded in Romania.”

“Gee coach, where do I sign?”

And this is where things get worse. Because if commerce means Tier Two nations lose their brilliant young players, it’s World Rugby that determines they can’t get them back.

Say, and this is a hypothetical, because he’s a brilliant player with a huge future, Taukei'aho’s first game off the bench for New Zealand, against Fiji, in Hamilton on Saturday, was his only ever All Black appearance – he would still be ineligible for Tonga (for whom he played Under 15, remember), forever.

That’s life, right? You place your bets, and you take your chances. But the risk isn’t evenly spread. The All Blacks (who claim they aren’t) can be as profligate as they like with these young players, there’s no risk for New Zealand here. So too England, Australia… pick the Tier One nation of your choice. But the players themselves, and the countries they might otherwise represent? They are the losers if the New Zealand gamble doesn’t work out.

Want some examples? Let’s begin with some one-test All Blacks, to really make the point. Take Tonga-born Frank Halai, a brilliant winger, one test for New Zealand and that’s it – the end of his Test career.

Or Sosene Anesi, Samoan-born, who came to New Zealand on a scholarship from St Joseph's College in Apia. He actually represented Samoa in Sevens, but then played one test for the All Blacks… and that was it.

Or what about Vaea Fifita, born and raised in Tonga, such a star at Tonga College he was picked for a Tongan Schools team to tour New Zealand...we know the rest, don’t we?

Played so well for Tongan Schools in NZ that Tamaki College offered him a rugby scholarship. Toki sio! Nine tests for the All Blacks, in Vaea’s case, and then… (you get it).

Again, no part of me blames these players for aiming for the All Blacks. Who wouldn’t?

Again, if the choice is poor pay and few games versus big pay and the possibility of World Cup victory with the world’s number one team (more often than not), who wouldn’t opt for the latter?

But Tonga and Samoa can’t possibly compete. What could they offer Halai or Anesi as the tide of New Zealand rugby carried them away? Seriously. What?

And here’s the question World Rugby needs to better answer.

If/when their All Black careers are over, after just a handful of Tests in a few cases, why couldn’t they represent Tonga or Samoa?

After a stand-down period, with the proviso that players can only move down a tier (to prevent the Uber Eats situation we see with school-rugby stars) and that they can only make that move once – why not? The answer, and you’ll love this, is “integrity”.

Let’s look at World Rugby’s 'Regulation 8. Eligibility to play for national representative teams'.

Here’s what World Rugby insists upon: “Once a Player has committed himself to a particular Union, through participation in one of the Matches or Tours… …he is unable to change his “Rugby Nationality” which becomes fixed.”

Why? Ladies and gentlemen, drum roll, please: “…the one Union only rule is designed to maintain the integrity of the international Game.”

With all due respect to that august institution, and to the language codes of this fine news website, what a load of bollocks.

Integrity. You could see its impact last month, in the English Premiership semi-finals.

In one semi-final the Bristol Bears played the Harlequins. In the Bristol Bears alone, there was Charles Piutau, Siale Piutau, Chris Vui and Steven Luatua. Charles Piutau and Luatua haven’t played for the All Blacks since 2015 and 2016, respectively.

Tonga and Samoa would have snapped them up, given the chance. The Bristol Bears can, but Tonga and Samoa can’t. Isn’t it funny how World Rugby’s determination “to maintain the integrity of the international Game” so strikingly favours both Tier One national sides and their clubs?

I saw this in 2019. Adrian Stevanon and I spent a week shooting a Sunday story with the Samoan team in Apia, prior to the Rugby World Cup.

Manu Samoa were once the darlings of international rugby but now many players are turning down the chance to represent their nations to keep big money contracts in Europe, and secure their futures.

Boy, they were committed that team. Almost every single player had made some form of financial sacrifice, some of them considerable sums, to be there.

And at the end of July (two years ago, this month), the people of Samoa responded with a radiothon.

We were there, as people phoned in their donations. Family after family. Village after village. Tala by tala. It was lovely - and it was sad.

Players came down to say “thank you”. And we could tell they so wished this wasn’t happening, as kind and generous and moving as it was.

Vui tweeted: “Thank you Samoa. Extremely humbled by the generosity of our people. Proud to be Samoan.”

And then Jack Lam, who is one of the finest people I’ve met in rugby, retweeted him, adding: “I love my country and proud to be Samoan. My wish is one day we won’t have to depend on the generosity of our people to get us to the World Cup or pay our players and have to make tough decisions like choosing between country and club.”

“Choosing between country and club”. That must be where World Rugby’s integrity at work.

Which brings us back, again, to Tonga losing by 102 points to the All Blacks.

And how, when the Tongan side was named, it contained so many new caps, so many players who might not have been expected to play Test rugby, that the rugby world was almost incredulous. Why? (Although we all know the reason, of course.)

An article on RNZ succinctly summed it up: “Tonga Rugby Union chief executive Peter Harding said a number of players… were worried being capped by Tonga would risk affecting their club contracts, while some were discouraged from playing by their agents.”

It’s worth repeating that. Players were “worried being capped by Tonga would risk affecting their club contracts…” Others were “discouraged from playing by their agents…”

Surely, World Rugby is ashamed of this? Surely? Maybe. But, tweaks aside, the evidence suggests they’re successfully overcoming that shame to live with it.

On Saturday, July 17th, the All Blacks beat Fiji by 60 to 13.

Life is repetitions, isn’t it? New Zealand scored nine tries, five of them to two players: Fijian-born Sevu Reece and Samisoni Taukei'aho (the Tongan Under 15 rep, we met previously).

The next morning, reading about Reece, I found an article from April 2019 in the Fiji Sun.

Sevu Reece scores against Fiji.

Sevuloni Reece To Decide, Flying Fijians Or All Blacks, the headline read. I hadn’t realised the Fijian selectors had hopes of picking him as recently as 2019.

The article gently tells us Sevuloni had spoken to “Flying Fijians head coach John McKee”, but was still yet to decide what country to play for. Although what kind of choice was it, really, given what each country could offer?

And then the Fiji Star article reflects on the prodigious talent Reece had displayed as a teenager in Fiji.

“He played for Queen Victoria School Under 18 in the Deans Trophy when he was only 16 years old.”

The Deans Trophy is the oldest and most prestigious competition in Fijian schoolboy rugby. Queen Victoria School has won it almost as many times as all other Fijian schools combined. Imagine being a star for them.

Beauden Barrett makes a pass against Tonga.

What dreams of international rugby his family must have had. Dreams that ended up, of course, in New Zealand.

The dream. It appeared on Sunday, after the Fiji test, when Stuff ran an article headlined: Samisoni Taukei'aho savours 'dream' All Blacks debut, leaves Ian Foster with tough call.

It was about the embarrassment of riches the All Blacks found themselves facing, with at least one outstanding player destined to be left out of the squad for the Rugby Championship - containing no Fiji, no Tonga, no Samoa, of course – they don’t get access to that table.

How Tier Two nations must dream of facing a dilemma like that.

I stress, again and again and again, that I don’t blame any of the players for this.

What would you do faced with such a choice? But it’s rugby’s own structures that make the playing field so unlevel, and “unlevel” directly benefits the Tier One nations that control World Rugby.

And then, as if injury needed insult, World Rugby’s eligibility rules mean that if the almost inevitable decision to go with a Tier One nation doesn’t work out, the Tier Two nation still doesn’t get access to the player.

Lose – lose. World Rugby calls that “integrity”.

After the All Blacks played Fiji, in Hamilton, the players from both sides stood together in a circle on the field and sung. It was a lovely scene. That’s the game I believe in, and love.

But singing doesn’t pay the bills. Money does.

When Tongan Rugby’s CEO tells us players “were worried being capped by Tonga would risk affecting their club contracts, while some were discouraged from playing by their agents”, we know that’s wrong.

When clubs in Tier One nations have greater pulling power, and offer far more money, than the national teams of Tier Two countries, we know what’s going to happen.

And when it does happen, and players with even a small number of games for a Tier One nation who have sometimes only qualified for that nation through residency after being signed to professional clubs there are lost to the Tier Two nations they sometimes even represented as teenagers, while Tonga is forced to scrape together a makeshift team to lose 102-0 to the All Blacks, we know that’s not right.

World Rugby has the capacity to change this. Will they? If they don’t, perhaps they could at least have the decency to stop describing it as “integrity”.

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