robmatic wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 11:58 am
Yr Alban wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 11:32 am
Tichtheid wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 9:50 am
Yeah, shame he didn’t fancy the light side, but good luck to him all the same.
Obviously it’s his choice and nobody else’s. But does this not bother him even a wee bit?
Would you expect people born and raised in Scotland with non-Scottish parents to feel guilty about playing for Scotland? Why should he be bothered about playing for the country he grew up in?
Apparently I touched a nerve here with several people. I wasn’t even trying to.
As it happens, I never used the word ‘guilty’. Nor did I intend anything quite so emotive. And I did say that who he wants to play for is entirely up to him. But we’re talking about a guy with a Scottish name, at least one Scottish parent, and whose grandfather played for Scotland and the Lions, and by whose own admission has ‘half of Scotland’ coming to watch him. It’s clearly a bit more complicated than ‘that’s the country he grew up in’. I know this because I was also born in England to Scottish parents and spent the first 13 years of my life living there. I was hopeless at rugby, but if I had been good enough, there’s only one country I could ever have represented, and that’s Scotland. People are different, of course, but I guess I find it difficult to understand how someone could have such a similar background to mine and yet always want to play for England. That’s all.
I’ve posted the following before, but it bears repetition here. We often get told about players like this that they were ‘born and brought up in England’ which is undeniably true. But you also have to take into account how that came to be the case. Rugby in Scotland is a very middle class game (except in the Borders, which has a tiny population) and tends to run in families, as the large number of brothers who have played for us attests. Middle class families are professionally mobile, and can and do go where the work is. In a UK context that almost invariably means London and the Home Counties. The outcome of this is that loads of Scottish rugby families end up having their kids in England. Then either we get criticised for picking players not born and raised in Scotland, or they pick England and play against us.
The final irony is that the professionally mobile people I’m talking about now includes actual professional rugby players, whose whole reason for leaving Scotland was to play rugby and get more money for doing it. Leading to the likes of Cam Redpath and Reuben Logan turning out for English age-group sides (yes, I know both have come back to the fold, but even so). They would probably both have been born in Scotland in the amateur era.
Long post, but I think there is a huge amount of nuance around this issue and I think ‘he grew up in England so why are you surprised he wants to play for them?’ is far too simple.
Scotland can pump both teams playing like that. Neither have been good in the last 2 weeks.