The fat lady is not even in the wings yet
Make no mistake about it – and irrespective of the result of next weekend’s third and final Test match – their 24-21 epic victory over the All Blacks at the Westpac Stadium in Wellington on Saturday morning UK time will go down as one of the greatest moments in the long history of the British and Irish Lions and may well help the concept behind them survive another quarter of a century at least.
Before I go any further, two brief comments in tribute to the Kiwis.
Firstly, for all the pressures that their opponents come under whenever they play the All Blacks – especially in the Land of The Long White Cloud – they’re no more than their culture and public heaps upon their own players. I’ve said it before, but the one way you gain the respect of the All Blacks is to beat them. Well, the Lions have now done that. But it doesn’t mean that the last Test will be a 50:50 game – more like 35:65 in the All Blacks’ favour, I reckon. They’ll be at home, at Eden Park, and hurting after this.
Secondly, and I have also mentioned this previously, one thing that I do admire about the Kiwis is that in public they take little for granted. On the rare occasions they come second best you tend not to find then whingeing or – as many coaches in many sports do – refusing to accept it and/or falling back into clichéd quasi-excuses about ‘what ifs’ and ‘taking the positives into next week’.
Here are a couple of quotes from Steve Hansen, their head coach, after a game materially affected by the sending off for a ‘dangerous to the head’ shoulder charge by Sonny Bill Williams on Anthony Watson in the 25th minute:
“The red card was a red card … it was one of those that could have been a yellow or a red, but [the referee] chose it to be a red so you just have to live with it … Sonny didn’t use his arms so he put himself at risk, and unfortunately he collected young Anthony’s head and put him at risk. You don’t want that … so off you go, boy.”
“… Whilst I am very proud of how we hung in there with 14 men, you have to take your hat off and say well done to the Lions, they deserved the win … What we should be getting excited about is it’s 1-1 and the Lions tonight played well and won the game and we’re going to Auckland to try and win it and they’re going to Auckland to try and win it …”
The statement in my opening paragraph above stems from the fact that, in the modern rugby union age with the details of a supposed ‘universal season’ being thrashed out by World Rugby even as we speak, the very existence of the Lions is under serious threat on two counts.
Firstly, that for all the regular media and medical bleeding-heart chatter about player welfare, the rugby powers-that-be are hell bent upon piling more and more big matches into the calendar which by definition extends seasons and increases the prospect of player ‘burnout’ and shorter careers plus potentially greater long term player health implications.
Secondly, in the above context, the concept of the Lions is inevitably (and some might say necessarily) under threat. Many rugby pundits were criticising this Lions tour schedule from the moment it was first announced, squeezed as it was into only six and a bit weeks. In the good old days the Lions were away three months and more – still not a luxury, but just about enough time to generate cohesion, team spirit and blend a squad together capable of challenging any world power in their own back yard.
Never mind the demands of the Southern Hemisphere nations who host the Lions when they tour every four years – the home nations from which they are drawn also want to ‘hobble’ the Lions as well, witness the English Premiership clubs’ recent proposal that future Lions tours should last only five weeks, not six.
My biggest concern right now is that World Rugby will end up adding an end-of-year ‘North versus South’ hemisphere-based three-Test series or similar to their ‘universal calendar’ which would surely be a death-knell for the Lions.
It sounds a bit ‘OTT’ to assert it, but if someone doesn’t get their defensive act together soon the whole Lions circus may bite the dust and go the way of the Barbarians ‘club’, a wonderful and free-spirited concept in its time (the Amateur era), which has gradually become a joke in the 21st Century, often attracting no more than half a stadium-ful of paying punters.
