@OomPB Do I have a historical fact for you!
“Ian Scott Smith (31 October 1903 – 18 September 1972) was a rugby union wing who played 32 Tests for Scotland and two Tests for the British Isles. Born in Melbourne, Australia, and brought up in New Zealand, Smith moved to England and was educated at Winchester College, before studying at Oxford University and later Edinburgh University. At Oxford he took up rugby and was eventually selected for Scotland, for whom he was eligible because of his Scottish parents.
[...]
In 1933, Smith captained Scotland for the Home Nations Championship.”
From Tony Collins’ A Social History of English Rugby Union (2009), p. 164:
“As the rugby correspondent of the Athletic News pointed out just before the First World War, there were no formal guidelines for national selection: ‘sentiment enters the process of qualification to a very great extent and if the stranger from afar has a reasonable sort of association with the land wherein he is domiciled he may, if he possesses no previous national distinction, be picked for that very land of temporary residence’. [...]
[T]he IB refused to ‘take any steps towards defining international qualifications’ but suggested cryptically that if a player took part in a trial match for a national side, that fact should be ‘worthy of the sporting considerations of several unions’, thus avoiding taking any position whatsoever. The immediate beneficiaries of the IB’s fence-sitting were the Scots, who won a Grand Slam in 1925 with a three-quarter line that included Melbourne-born and New Zealand-educated Ian Smith, 1921 All Black captain George Aitken and A.C. ‘Johnny’ Wallace, who was to captain the New South Wales tour of the UK in 1927.”
Sorry to intervene, I just thought it was interesting how much present-day Scotland rugby mirrors the team from a century ago.
