FOR a humble, softly spoken individual, John Hardie generates a lot of controversy. It started when he arrived from New Zealand in July, having left the Highlanders to throw in his lot with Scotland. It continued when he was named in the team to play Italy in Turin, and it would certainly have gone on, whatever the circumstances, when he was included in Vern Cotter’s final squad of 31 for the Rugby World Cup. The fact that he was named yesterday as the only openside flanker in that squad - which meant that Blair Cowan and John Barclay were omitted - merely added to the furore.

The Hardie affair is reminiscent of the row that surrounded Brendan Laney when he arrived from New Zealand back in 2001. We were at a different stage of the World Cup cycle then, which arguably meant there was not such a pressing need to introduce Laney into the national team, but the arguments advanced on either side of the debate were pretty similar in both cases.

He is good enough, and he is eligible. That was the message from Ian McGeechan, then the national coach, when he picked Laney for Scotland just days after he had signed for Edinburgh. For McGeechan, merit and eligibility were the only relevant criteria.

Hardie, too, is eligible, and Cotter deems him to be good enough. The coach was pretty impressed by the forward’s only Test outing so far - “16 tackles, no misses” was his verdict yesterday on Hardie’s showing against the Italians - but we should also accept that he has a larger body of evidence from which to make his decision.

Hardie may only have played for little more than 50 minutes in Turin, but he turned out more than 50 times for the Highlanders. Cotter might be too diplomatic to say so in public, but some of those games may just have been of a higher standard than that soporific slugfest of a Test.

For the current coach, as for McGeechan, ability and eligibility are what count. Any notion that players should pay their dues - for example by turning out a few times in the domestic game or in the PRO12 - appears irrelevant. That would be difficult in any case for Hardie, who does not even have a club or professional team to play for at present.

You can sympathise with Hardie to an extent, because at its worst, some of the criticism aimed at him verges on the xenophobic. Under the current eligibility rules, he is as qualified as anyone to represent Scotland. And, while he has been called “New Zealand-born John Hardie” so frequently it seems to have become his full name, we should not forget that he is far from the only current Scotland player not to have been born here. Those two men to whom he has been preferred, for example, are New Zealand-born Cowan and Hong Kong-born Barclay.

You can also sympathise with Cotter for selecting a player he honestly thinks is the best in the position. That’s his job: to decide on the best individuals, and the best combinations of individuals, and coach them to give of their best for Scotland at the Rugby World Cup.

As the coach of the top team in the country, Cotter has to focus on that task to the exclusion of other, wider and deeper, concerns about the state of the game. He has been here for less than a year, and even if he sees out his new extended contract he will only be around for a couple of years longer. He has little or no time to look at coaching programmes at age-group level and work out why we do not have enough good young players coming through in certain positions.

McGeechan, of course, was in a different position. He and Jim Telfer, whom he succeeded as the SRU’s director of rugby, were the two most influential men in the game. While his immediate priority was to get the national team playing to the highest possible standard, McGeechan had also been involved long enough to be able to identify any shortcomings in coaching programmes and to do something about rectifying them.

The future of Scottish rugby did not hinge on how well the team did against the All Blacks - the fixture for which Laney was initially selected. There was no need to rush him into the team, hence the accusations of indecent haste that were levelled at McGeechan.

Still, while that is one difference between the circumstances in which those two players were selected, the overriding feeling is that they are depressingly familiar. Fourteen years on, other countries’ second- or third- or fourth-choice players are still better than our own first-choice ones in some positions - at least in the judgment of our national coaches.

Every so often we are told of new initiatives from Murrayfield about coaching young players, and no doubt those initiatives are worthy enough. But they are still not good enough, or comprehensive enough, to bring those young players into a domestic structure capable of producing a whole national team. That failure should be the real source of controversy within the game.