When Ireland coach Eddie O’Sullivan picked his team for the opening Six Nations 2003 game against Scotland back in February, most British-based supporters of Irish rugby once more had their head in their hands – Geordan Murphy had been overlooked again.

What more did this superstar have to prove? If anything illustrated that old Biblical phrase about the prophet honoured everywhere except in his own land, it was surely the career of the “George Best of rugby”.

Despite scoring two tries on his Ireland debut against the USA in 2000, only a paltry collection of caps was to follow in the next three years as Murphy lit up the Zurich Premiership and Heineken Cup with his dazzling footwork and brilliant handling skills. Not even a starring role in Leicester’s defeat of the leading Irish provinces Leinster and Munster during the Tigers’ victorious Heineken campaign of 2002 seemed to sway the Irish selectors.

My fellow supporters of London Irish were perhaps the least surprised by Murphy’s continued ill-fortune. Fans of the Exiles had argued for years that their players have not had a fair crack of the whip from the Irish selectors.

Hadn’t our most exciting player Niall Woods, blessed with that most thrilling of rugby talents, the sidestep at pace, been similarly overlooked in the late 1990s? Wasn’t our greatest modern player Conor O’Shea scapegoated for a bad Twickers defeat in 2000 and never played for Ireland again despite being at the height of his powers? Hasn’t our fly-half Barry Everitt led every points-scoring table in the English game over the last few years but he is deemed not fit to even win a single cap?

The conclusive proof of bias for London Irish fans came with the Declan Danaher fiasco in 2001. Danaher had played for Ireland U19s and his progress was so rapid that he broke into the London Irish first team, with everyone including the British rugby media forecasting a glittering international future for the London-born flanker.

Everyone, that is, except the Ireland U21 selectors led by Ciaran Fitzgerald. Incredibly, despite playing in the toughest club rugby league in the world, Danaher wasn’t considered good enough to play in an U21 team made up largely of amateur youngsters who had never played top-class rugby. Danaher was told by Fitzgerald’s selectorial cronies that he wasn’t “tough” enough, which must have been news to all those Zurich Premiership defences that Danaher has been barnstorming through that season.

Ever the clever opportunist, Clive Woodward took the wounded Danaher under his wing and had him playing for the England A team within a year, tieing Danaher to the England rugby cause for life, under tough new International Rugby Board (IRB) eligibility rules that stop players changing countries.

The treatment of Danaher by the Irish selectors marked a new low in the relationship between the IRFU and the London Irish club that had been festering since the launch of professionalism in 1995.

In the amateur era prior to 1995, there had been a rich history of the Exile club providing countless players to the Ireland national cause. The Ireland team that came the closest of all nations to beating the champion Australians in the 1991 World Cup had as many as four London Irish players in the back division alone.

But the long history of harmony between London Irish and the IRFU came to an end in 1996 with a huge row. The Heineken Cup had been launched and the IRFU wanted London Irish to release their best players to play for the provinces in the new European tournament. But London Irish were naturally reluctant to lend their paid employees to other rugby teams, particularly as the Exiles were themselves playing in the second-tier tournament, the European Conference (now the Parker Pen).

The IRFU took this as a betrayal of Ireland’s cause and London Irish’s good name was poisoned throughout the Irish rugby fraternity, with countless hatchet pieces written in the Irish press, including by the doyen of Irish rugby journalists, Ned van Esbeck.

Partly as a response to this situation, the IRFU in 1998 implemented a policy of buying up all the contracts of leading Irish players playing overseas, aiming to strengthen the national team by creating strong provinces. The IRFU policy devastated the London Irish team, who lost 80% of their players and had to team-build virtually from scratch with mostly non-Irish players.

But the IRFU policy threw up an intriguing question: how would they treat those few Irish players who had not decided to return home but remain in England? Would they be discriminated against in selection to provide a deterrent that stopped talented young players leaving the provinces for the bright lights of the Zurich Premiership?

Many London Irish supporters would tell you that this is what happened to Conor O’Shea and Niall Woods. The former Exile-turned-Wasp Rob Henderson might have been a star on the Lions 2001 tour, but remarkably back in 1999 the Irish selectors didn’t think he was good enough to even make the Ireland World Cup squad for that year. Latter-day victims of bias, so the conspiracy theory goes, have included Declan Danaher, Barry Everitt and Geordan Murphy.

As a London Irish supporter, this was a conspiracy theory I subscribed to, and argued in favour of on the LI supporters’ website, the Sunbury Centre www.london-irish.co.uk for many years. But I now think I was wrong to do so.

I was wrong for two reasons. Firstly, I think there is too much evidence the other way of British-based players getting fair treatment from the Ireland selectors. Secondly, for British-based supporters of Irish rugby to carry this chip on their shoulder about selection bias can have profoundly damaging consequences in creating a climate of opinion that persuades young second-generation Irish players such as Danaher to forsake their Irish identity and be seduced by Woodward’s Team England.

Let’s look at the first argument. If British-based players are discriminated against, how on earth did Kevin Maggs reach the remarkable landmark of 50 caps this season? I am personally of the view that the one-dimensional Maggs probably doesn’t deserve 5 Irish caps, never mind 50, but no one can argue that the Irish selectors haven’t kept faith with the Bristolian who has only ever played for two English West Country clubs. The same argument can be made for the Easterby brothers. Guy Easterby is a particularly interesting case – he must have the slowest scrum-half pass in international rugby but that has never stopped the Wales-based Yorkshireman featuring in virtually every Irish squad for the past four years. A superstar like Keith Wood of course writes his own rules, so he’s not a good example to use, but it is noteworthy that the Irish selectors have always preferred his Quins team-mate Paul Burke to the many talented young Irish outhalves like Jeremy Staunton, Andy Dunne and Paddy Wallace.

For me the clincher that there is no selectorial bias has been provided this season, appropriately enough, by a London Irish player. Justin Bishop is no superstar in the mould of BOD or Murphy, but he is one of the hardest-working rugby players you will ever come across, supremely fit with a ferocious defence. A fine season for the Exiles in 2002 was rewarded with a recall to the Irish squad. Bishop kept working hard at squad sessions and….what a reward he was finally given by the Irish selectors – picked for probably the biggest Ireland game ever, this year’s Grand Slam showdown with England. The national selectors have also kept faith with his club team-mate Kieron Dawson. The flanker has had a wretched run of injuries over the past couple of years and his form has peaked and dipped accordingly, as many London Irish supporters would concede. But he was still given his chance with selection for Ireland’s game in Tonga last month.

The conundrum of why Geordan Murphy hasn’t got the caps he deserved lies less with the fact that he plays for an English club and is more to do with the conservative, defensive approach that Ireland coaches such as Warren Gatland and now Eddie O’Sullivan have favoured in recent years. Reliable defensive players such as Girvan Dempsey and Kevin Maggs have piled up the caps because their style of play has perfectly fitted the Ireland gameplan of forward dominance, tactical kicking, defensive solidity above all else and backline offence only deep in the opponent’s half. It was a gameplan that, of course, worked perfectly in England’s 2001 defeat in Dublin.

Murphy is not the only ‘flair’ player who has been judged more on their defence than on their brilliant offence. His fellow twinkletoes Niall Woods never recovered from being given a reputation as a poor defender. Denis Hickie has also struggled to overcome such an image and has only done so in the last couple of years after missing out on caps. The Munster centre Mike Mullins is another who has missed out on caps because of defensive suspicions.

Of course, Murphy is not a poor defender, on the contrary. It was just the judgement of the Irish selectors that Dempsey was the safer option, a judgement that we can all hope that with Murphy’s recent award as Ireland’s international player of the 2002/3 season, will never be made again.

So I would conclude that there is, within reason, a level selectorial playing field for players based in Britain and those in Ireland. However, I would add one caveat to that, and this perhaps best explains what happened to Declan Danaher.

I’ve never heard any Ireland selector at senior level argue in favour of favouring home-based players. But I did read a couple of years ago one very regrettable interview with a youth selector, whose name I forget, who did argue that when faced between choosing players of the same ability, one based in Ireland, and one in England, that the home-based player would receive preference.

Such acknowledged bias is unacceptable and we can only hope that such views will be eventually discredited. It is in Irish rugby’s interest that they are discredited.

The Danaher situation was a bad own goal for the IRFU. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Danaher’s response, defection to the England camp, remains the ideal solution for talented second-generation Irish players. Maybe the example of his London Irish team-mate, Justin Bishop, of dogged hard work to convince the Irish selectors, would have been a better course to follow?

Clive Woodward is one of the most powerful figures in world rugby and his arguments can be very persuasive for impressionable young players. It is a little known fact that Danaher was not Woodward's first success at turning the head of a young London Irish player against his Irish identity. While coach of London Irish in 1995, Woodward was also coach of the England U21s side. Woodward persuaded a talented young winger who had played for Ireland U21s to defect to England U21s – his name, Justin Bishop.

Bishop told the Irish Examiner: ''I suppose when you're young you seem to chop and change for no particular reason. It's just the way things happened. Perhaps it was a case of the grass being greener. It did feel strange playing for England but it was an opportunity to play international rugby.''

Fortunately for the cause of Irish rugby, Ma Bishop from Holywood, County Down, saw off Woodward’s influence. ''She had a say,'' admits Bishop, ''and she was pleased I opted for Ireland.''

But sadly, tighter IRB rules on qualification mean that someone like Declan Danaher has no opportunity to change his mind as team-mate Bishop did six years previously. In the same boat is London Irish’s richly talented young scrum-half Kevin Barrett. As an Irish Exiles U21 player, he was another like Danaher to unluckily miss out on Ireland U21 honours. Enter Woodward. And Barrett, having now played for England 7s team, can never strive for Ireland caps again.

London Irish have other outstanding dual-qualified youngsters such as Rob Hoadley and Nick Kennedy who have yet to be definitively seduced by the Woodward charm.

Constant whingeing about selection bias will not help these young players make the choice that British-based supporters of Irish rugby would want them to make. Remember, for every Geordan Murphy, there is also an Eric Miller who found it easier to get into the Ireland team as a Leicester player than he now does as a Leinster one.

This season sees the first significant migration of young Irish rugby talent to Britain in a decade. Connacht’s Johnny O’Connor and Gavin Duffy, and Leinster’s Andy Dunne are heading to London clubs, a sign that the IRFU are relaxing their policy of monopolising talent for the provinces. This is a welcome and sensible step, the greater resources and money of the Zurich Premiership should be utilised as a finishing school for young Irish talent and give Ireland selection options beyond the Munster-Leinster-Ulster 1st teamers.

With the IRFU embracing this more pragmatic approach, it also time for us British-based Ireland supporters to lose the chip off our shoulders and can the conspiracy theories.

View a Printer Friendly version of this Story.

Bookmark or share this story with:

• Digg
• Delicious
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Stumbleupon