Australia will not follow South Africa in scrapping overseas-based restrictions on players
Tuesday 26 February 2019 07:50, UK
Australia will not follow South Africa by scrapping its restrictions on overseas-based players representing their country, the governing body's chief has said.
South Africa introduced a 30-cap criteria for overseas-based players to play Test rugby in 2017 to encourage young talent to avoid signing lucrative club contracts in Europe and Japan but with the World Cup a few months away abandoned it at the weekend.
Australia, who previously did not allow anyone based abroad to play Tests, created a similar rule before the last World Cup - dubbed the 'Giteau Law', which demanded a minimum of 60 caps.
"At the moment, we're very comfortable with the way it's performing," said Rugby Australia chief Raelene Castle.
"The Giteau Law for us is a rule that's in place that we review often because we need to make sure that it's delivering to the outcomes that we put it in place for.
"And we believe it is, we believe the benchmark is right as a 60-test threshold because if you've played 60 tests for your country you deserve the chance to look at other options because you have the training maturity and the professionalism to come back into the Wallaby environment and fit right in.
"We think from a going overseas perspective it's right, we think probably if we lowered it, what it does do is potentially have us lose some of the current talent that we have playing here in Super Rugby.
"And Super Rugby is also incredibly important for us because we need to make sure that our four teams are successful in the Super Rugby competition."
Wallabies head coach Michael Cheika was instrumental behind the rule change and benefited from the introduction of experienced backs like Matt Giteau and Drew Mitchell, who were both playing for Toulon at the time, to his squad for the 2015 World Cup.
Australia reached the final in England but have enjoyed three difficult seasons since, raising doubts over their ability to win the World Cup for the third time in Japan.
