With a home World Cup coming up for Australia later in 2026, Hooper knows he must perform well in Europe if he is to make the Wallabies squad.<\/p>\n
While Australia are happy to pick overseas players, they will give priority to home-based options if there is little to choose between the options. <\/p>\n
Hooper says the improvements he is making in Europe and his ambitions to make the World Cup are driving him in his first season in the northern hemisphere. <\/p>\n
“When I came over here I knew full well there was a possibility I wasn’t going to be playing for the Wallabies any more,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But my manager and I sat down face to face and I said ‘do you back me?’ He said ‘yes’, and then I said ‘awesome, I’ll back myself’.<\/p>\n
“I had a phone call with Joe Schmidt [Australia head coach] and basically he said ‘I’m going to favour picking guys from home soil, but if you’re the clear standout then I’ll pick you’.<\/p>\n
“On that phone call, I just said ‘all right, well, it’s a pretty clear objective for me, I’m just going to make sure that I make you pick me’.<\/p>\n
“So it was a gamble, but also all the power kind of lies in my court and I’m just going to make sure if I keep playing good rugby then I’ll keep getting picked for the teams that I want to be picked [for].<\/p>\n
“That’s obviously Exeter Chiefs first and foremost, that’s where my priority is right now, performing for this team, and off the back of that I know I’ll get picked for the gold jersey.<\/p>\n
“That’s one of my greatest desires, just being in that jersey and performing well at a home World Cup.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With a home World Cup coming up for Australia later in 2026, Hooper knows he must perform well…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-565551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}