The number of imported talents in the Scotland squad for this year’s Six Nations continues to be a point of contention. In an interview with The Times this week, Craig Chalmers, the former Scotland fly half, bemoaned the shortage of homegrown players and said that Finn Russell is “the only person who speaks with a proper Scottish accent”.
In the 2½ years he has been in Glasgow, Sione Tuipulotu would never claim to have lost his Melbourne accent for the brogue of his adopted country, but at least he has something of a grounding, as he qualifies through a grandmother from Greenock who emigrated to Australia. Then again, given that American audiences required subtitles for the 2002 film Sweet Sixteen, which was set in Greenock, perhaps his gran had modified the harsher elements of her native accent for her new neighbours down under.
For the SQ (Scottish Qualified) programme — scouring the globe for Scottish qualified players to augment the country’s meagre playing resources — Tuipulotu, 27, has become a conspicuous success. Before he won the first of his 24 Scotland caps so far, he was eligible to play for Tonga (through his father) or Italy (his Scottish grandmother, Jacqueline, married an Italian), as well as Australia, for whom he played age-group internationals up to under-20 level.
Born in Frankston, a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, Tuipulotu graduated from the junior ranks to become the first Victorian homegrown player to represent Melbourne Rebels, the Super Rugby franchise launched in 2010 to grow the game in the heartland of Australian Rules. But he was struggling to get a regular start for the Rebels and had moved to play in Japan when his agent made Scottish Rugby aware of the possibilities that Jacqueline’s Greenock roots opened up.
Scotland does not naturally produce a host of powerful hard-running centres and so Gregor Townsend, the Scotland head coach, and Danny Wilson, in charge at Glasgow Warriors at the time, investigated further.
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“Gregor was a big fan,” Wilson said. “When he saw some of his video clips, and then when we went to meet Sione, it became pretty apparent that he’d be someone that we would want to bring to Glasgow, and that Gregor would want to bring to Scotland.”
Like Manu Tuilagi for England over the past decade, and Bundee Aki for Ireland more recently, Tuipulotu now brings Pacific Island muscle to the midfield as the sort of ball-carrying threat the home unions struggle to produce. With smart hands and a decent boot as well, he looks a natural fit in the No 12 shirt, although when he first arrived at Glasgow in the summer of 2021, he actually came with ideas of playing on the wing.
“He’d played on the wing a fair amount in Japan and he had his own view that he could play there,” Wilson said. “But we didn’t really think that was the best use of his talents. He can play No 12 or No 13 and we played him at No 13 quite a bit alongside Sam Johnson. But it soon became apparent that his impact could be devastating at No 12. It didn’t take long for him to hit the ground running and make a name for himself.”
Within weeks of making his Glasgow debut, Tuipulotu was called up by Townsend for the autumn internationals, making his debut at Murrayfield against Tonga, his father’s homeland. Four more caps followed in the 2022 Six Nations, two of them from the bench, although he has admitted that he was far from the finished product during his first European winter.
“I was quite a raw talent,” he said recently. “To be a Test player, you’ve got to polish those edges out of your game and it’s taken me a while. Steve [Tandy, the defence coach] will tell you that when I first came to Scotland, I was a bit of a rogue defender. I’ve learned a lot from Steve.”
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Recognising that they had a potential diamond on their hands, Glasgow and Scotland have kept polishing those edges so that they now have a player on their hands, an inside centre who looks comfortable on the international stage and is much more than merely a potent physical presence.
“He’s a very rounded player now, somebody who has the ability to play with an element of finesse to go with his raw power,” Wilson said. “He has a good skill level around his kicking game as well. With the Lions tour coming up next year [to Australia] and the way he’s playing, he must have a real good chance of making that squad.”
However divisive the policy of recruiting players from outside the country may be, there is no doubt that Tuipulotu has played his part in the progress Scotland have made in recent seasons, growing into an important leadership figure in the back line.
He will be one of the side’s vice-captains at Murrayfield against England, a return on Scotland’s investment in his potential. “Glasgow and Edinburgh have invested a huge amount of money in their squads, with a big-picture plan linking to the national team,” Wilson said. “That’s meant they’ve kept a lot of top-class internationals in Scotland and also signed a lot of top-class foreign talent.
“Sione has been a big part of that and he’s a huge presence in the squad now.”
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The Tuipulotu presence in Scottish rugby could yet increase. Sione’s younger brother, Mosese, is a 22-year-old centre playing for the Waratahs in Super Rugby, and Townsend has already made enquiries as to whether he might be interested in following his brother north. A third brother, Ottavio, is a 19-year-old hooker in Melbourne Rebels’ academy, and his progress will be closely tracked.
Townsend’s gratitude to that grandmother from Greenock, which is already considerable, could be set to grow greater still.
Scotland v England
Six Nations, Murrayfield
Saturday, 4pm
TV: BBC 1