Folau looks set to cause more havoc off the pitch

Precious few players are described as “undroppable” a mere half an hour into their Test careers, but no one ever mistook Israel Folau for Joe Ordinary.

- CHRIS HEWETT

“We won’t be ditching this guy in a hurry,” said an Australian scribe a few seconds after the Wallaby newcomer had put a spellbinding brace of tries past the Lions in Brisbane eight years ago. “It would be like leaving ‘Genesis’ out of the Bible.”

Which was an interesting way of putting it, as things turned out. Folau has always had a closer relationship with the Good Book than with his own press cuttings – “As a Christian, I stand by the Bible and what the Bible says…every word that’s written,” he said recently – and as a consequence, he has become the single most divisive figure in the recent history of the Union game.

It was primarily his fundamentalist take on sex and gender issues, expressed with a considerable degree of force on social media in 2019, that landed him in a sea of strife. Folau was removed from the Wallaby squad, his Rugby Australia contract was torn up, at least one major sponsor cut ties with him and he spent much of 2019 in the company of the legal profession before reaching a confidential settlement with his previous employers and switching codes – not to mention continents – by joining the Catalan Dragons in France.

That was that, we thought. But we thought wrong. All of sudden, Folau is back in the 15-man business with the Japanese Top League club NTT Communications Shining Arcs – not so much a name as an essay. (The old “give us a B…” joke about Borussia Monchengladbach is ancient history).