YESTERDAY’S confirmation by World Rugby that they are to examine the sport’s residency rule came as no surprise. Since the global governing body first announced the impending review back in May, the three-year qualification period has become a more topical issue by the day, as we approach the start of the Rugby World Cup and national squads are announced.

Certainly, after a World Cup is the best time to conduct such a review, when we have fresh statistics about the numbers of players who turn out at the highest level of the game for countries with which they have no blood link. But there is a compelling argument that the residency rule should not be looked at in isolation, and that the current law which confers eligibility through a grandparent should also be revisited.

Let’s take Scotland as an example, and look at four players who are currently in contention for a place in Vern Cotter’s final squad for the World Cup. Hugh Blake, capped for the first time last week, and John Hardie, named yesterday in the squad for Saturday’s game against Ireland, are both New Zealanders who qualify through their blood line. WP Nel, who is also in that squad, has just become eligible through residency. His fellow South African Josh Strauss will qualify mere days before the tournament begins.

On the face of it, Hardie and Blake may seem to have greater ties to their adoptive land. They have family from here, and must therefore have grown up feeling a certain affinity for Scotland. For Nel and Strauss, conversely, there is no obvious link to this country.

On the other hand, you could argue that the two Kiwis are only connected to Scotland thanks to an accident of birth, and that Nel and Strauss have made a more deliberate choice. What is more, the latter two have been plying their trade here since 2012, and are thus committed in a way that neither Hardie nor Blake could claim, Hardie having arrived here just last month, Blake having travelled north at the turn of the year.

A similar distinction could be made between others who qualified through the two different routes. Could you really say, for example, that New Zealander Brendan Laney, called up by Scotland just days after arriving here, was somehow more suited to playing for us than Dutchman Tim Visser? Laney qualified through a grandparent, Visser through living here for three years.

I’m not casting aspersions on any of those individuals, by the way. They all have a right to represent Scotland and no doubt feel totally passionate about doing so. But, in a globetrotting age in which more people are more ethnically diverse than ever before, it is worth questioning what it actually means to have a blood line that qualifies you to pull on a certain jersey.

There must be quite a few people around these days, for example, with grandparents from four different countries. And, given the globalisation of labour, it is wholly plausible that their parents could come from two other countries – and that they themselves could be born in a seventh.

In that case, could such a player really feel an emotional attachment to one country – especially one in which he had spent little or no time? And even if he did, could we really see it as a greater emotional attachment than that of someone who had qualified for that country because they had lived there for three years?

So far, World Rugby is only going to look at residency – and even there, it has committed itself to doing little more than mulling over the issue. “We are doing a consultation with the unions to determine what their view is,” Brett Gosper, World Rugby’s chief executive, told Radio 5 Live. “What we are going to do is look at it. Certainly Bernard Lapasset [World Rugby’s president] feels it is something that needs to be looked at and I think I share his view.”

But almost certainly, the unions are not going to have a unanimous view on the issue. Would the likes of Samoa, for instance, really see eye to eye with New Zealand on the issue? And if there are going to be differences of opinion, which unions will hold sway? The richest, most powerful ones, of course.

We need stronger leadership than that from World Rugby, and we need to have eligibility rules that strengthen the sport in as many countries as possible, not undermine it. Both the grandparent rule and the three-year criterion need to be looked at – together, so that coherent reforms can be arrived at.

In the meantime, until such reforms are implemented, we should offer an equal welcome to every eligible player who turns up in this country and wants to play for Scotland. Hardie and Blake, Nel and Strauss, are plying their trade and making the most of their talents. Any grievance we may feel about the laxity of the laws which allow them to do so should be directed not at them, but at the world governing body that implemented those laws in the first place – and at the individual unions that lobbied for them out of self-interest rather than a care for the welfare and growth of the sport.