If I was a cynical member of the RFU, I might smell a rat at Julian Salvi's one-year sojourn at Bath Rugby.
Is he an Australian Rugby Union spy, uncovering the secrets of Northern Hemisphere rugby before returning south to report back to his spy-masters? And all this just a year before the World Cup. Hmmm, suspicious....
I jest, of course. But I actually believe the flanker's spell in Bath can carry some salutary lessons for rugby bosses across the globe.
Currently the men who run the national set-ups in Australia, South Africa and a whole host of other top-tier rugby union countries insist that players must ply their club trade in their homeland if they are to stand any chance of being picked for their national team.
This, to my mind, illustrates how parochialism, narrow-mindedness and an element of micro-management has crept into the way the game is run.
We live in a globalised world where – in many parts of the West – people, capital and goods can flow over national boundaries with little restriction. Yet a form of hidebound 'protectionism' exists in the way rugby is governed.
An England star might just get away with having the audacity to play club rugby in France but team manager Martin Johnson has made it plain that such a player will be all but discounted if he heads south of the equator.
Yet who are England's greatest rivals on the world stage? They are New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. And to beat your rivals, you need to understand how they operate.
So why aren't England's Elite Player Squad members free to take contracts with Southern Hemisphere clubs, given that such experiences would expose them to how key figures in rival national set-ups operate? It's insular; it's barmy.
Apologists of the current arrangements will point out that national coaches need to have their players close by for training camps but that can be circumvented by ensuring players have the appropriate clauses in their contracts to enable them to return for those sessions. It's not rocket science and the different perspective that those Antipodean-based players would bring to such sessions would surely be worth the air fare.
In my view, Salvi did something very canny in leaving Canberra for a year or so's spell with Bath. A rising star in the Australian rugby firmament, he can now return to his homeland with a firm grasp of what makes the Northern Hemisphere rugby world tick. He's played in Paris, Edinburgh, Belfast and Twickenham, not to mention all the main club stadia in England.
With a World Cup imminent, I would have thought such insights would be invaluable to the Australian Rugby Union. Couple that with his skills in the loose and he'd be in my Wallabies' squad in a flash.
I'm not advocating the wholesale migration of England's best players, nor do I want to see the Guinness Premiership turned into a procession of well-paid Southern Hemisphere show ponies, but the scales need to tip a little more in the direction of a laissez-faire arrangement.
Nurturing home-grown talent through Premiership clubs' academies is crucial for the future of English rugby but the RFU has to acknowledge that a player immersing themselves in a world-beating rugby culture a few thousand miles away isn't necessarily a bad thing for the Red Rose.
And that's why hanging such players as Melbourne-bound Danny Cipriani out to dry would be an act of short-sighted folly by the RFU.
Read more of my opinions at http://www.thisisbath.co.uk/bathrugby.
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tomjbradshaw
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