Australia rugby quartet hope to set fire to Six Nations

Eddie Jones may have left the European rugby scene – but the Six Nations Championship will still have a real Aussie flair when the tournament kicks off this weekend.

While Jones has left England to rediscover his rugby roots back home as a Wallabies coach, four Australian players, who are expertly plying their craft in the UK and Ireland, aim to make a difference on the field.

When Ireland and Scotland named their sides for the weekend’s opening games on Thursday, the two sides were made up of a quartet of Australians who had qualified for their chosen rugby countries through family ties.

The most conspicuous selection was Ireland manager Andy Farrell, who gave Canberra-born prop forward Finlay Bealham his first-ever Six Nations start aged 31 on Saturday in the heat of the blast furnace at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium.

Bealham, who plays for Irish provincial club Connacht, qualified for the national team through his Northern Ireland grandmother and has already won 27 caps.

But 23 of them have come as substitutes and this time he is being asked to make a big step forward by replacing Ireland’s injured star Tadhg Furlong.

However, having featured at Tighthead and coming off the bench to impress in previous games, Farrell feels he deserves his crack.

“He’s playing excellent rugby at the moment. The last game he played he scored a hat trick, he’s playing very well so he deserves a start,” Farrell said.

“Finlay is a massive personality in our squad, he’s very popular… his performances have been top-notch.”

The Canberra-Connacht connection have also picked Mack Hansen, whose mother is from Cork, for another Ireland cap, with the winger looking to repeat his man of the match performance against the Welshmen last year.

In the Scottish ranks taking on England in the Calcutta Cup at Twickenham, Sione Tuipulotu will start in the middle, winning his 12th cap and hoping to complement his first tries for Scotland, which he scored against Argentina in November.

25-year-old Victorian Tuipulotu, a former Australia Under-20 international whose Scottish grandmother is from Greenock, will be joined at the Scotland 23 by Glasgow Warriors team-mate Jack Dempsey, Sydney’s ex-Wallabies flanker who will be coming off the bench to win a fifth international match.

After his last appearance for Australia at the 2019 World Cup, Dempsey was able to move to Scotland, his maternal grandfather’s homeland, after a three-year Test absence.