LIONS CANNOT EXPECT FAVOURS
Tourists just have to live with officials’ calls, says McHugh
THERE was no getting away from the ghost of Brian O’Driscoll when Warren Gatland was confirmed in midweek as repeat Lions coach for next June’s tour to New Zealand. The Kiwi didn’t specifically mention O’Driscoll by name at the unveiling but the insinuation was clear – his controversial decision to jettison the Ireland legend for the final match of the Test series in Australia had made for one of the toughest weeks of his coaching career and the memory still festered three years on.
By the time Gatland’s latest pride lands in New Zealand at the tail-end of next May, though, a different ghost from O’Driscoll’s past will the narrative –that infamous spear tackle by Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu which left the then Lions skipper in a heap and out of the series with less than a minute played in Christchurch.
The lack of disciplinary sanction meted out to the errant New Zealand pair became the tale that overshadowed the convincing 3-0 blackwash of the Lions, and this feeling that a blind eye is allegedly turned to All Black foul play when they play at home hasn’t dissolved. The issue was reignited a fortnight ago when an apparent gouge by prop Owen Franks on Kane Douglas, Australia’s former Leinster lock, went uncited.
O’Driscoll himself was enraged, taking to Twitter after Franks was left in the clear. ‘This is an absolute sham @WorldRugby?! Makes a mockery of citing. If nothing comes of this, it’s a farce.’
His opinion generated an angry stir among New Zealanders dismissing him as a whiner who still hasn’t got over what happened him in 2005. However Franks’ non-citing is apparently a serious enough topic that it will now be raised at next month’s World Rugby executive committee meeting in Dublin. Who knows what will comes of it – if anything – in the boardroom but the way the incident played out last month is a timely reminder of the rugby furnace the Lions will step into in nine months’ time.
Former Irish Test referee David McHugh, who travelled on the ’05 tour as Clive Woodward’s special refereeing advisor, insists the sport is equipped to avoid a repeat of the O’Driscoll type carry-on which coloured the Lions’ previous visit and left the wounded party depicted as the villain of the piece by the parohaunt chial hometown media.
‘The views are very well known on O’Driscoll and in terms of how the game is equipped to deal with foul play, I like to think it is better equipped, I like to think there is less of it, but look if you go back to 2005 that is just something that shouldn’t have happened,’ said McHugh.
Given the high stakes and because it is a New Zealand tour, every refereeing nuance throughout the 10-match tour will be heavily analysed and dissected.
With this in mind, McHugh suggests it might be no bad thing for the Lions if Gatland mirrored Woodward’s approach and has a referee on the Lions staff who can actively iron out queries about interpretations and monitor implementation on the training ground.
‘I felt it added value to what was the
most unsuccessful Lions tour ever,’ insisted the Corkman. ‘It hasn’t been done since but it’s a question of how you perceive things.
‘Clive Woodward had used Steve Lander with England prior to that (when winning the 2003 World Cup in Australia) and he considered it a worthwhile position and wanted to bring someone with him.
‘In terms of my side of things and how my role evolved, there was only one match where we gave away more than 10 penalties and we came out on the right side of the penalty count more often than not and gave away very few yellow cards, but we still got beaten up in terms of the actual rugby.’
The pitch wasn’t the only place the Lions were beaten up 11 years ago, the tourists feebly losing the offpitch battle in capturing hearts and minds of the locals who forensically followed the tour and refused to take the visitors’ views seriously, particularly when it came to the O’Driscoll bust-up.
McHugh recalls how it didn’t help that it was Alastair Campbell, the press secretary for the Tony Blair Labour Government that had just been re-elected in the UK, who was fighting the Lions’ corner in his guise as tour communications manager. The Kiwis simply wouldn’t listen to him.
‘New Zealand is a particularly distinctive place to go for rugby. It would be like taking your summer holidays in Kilkenny and listening to hurling every day of the week. There is no getting away from it. It’s rugby, rugby, rugby and it’s very pervasive.
‘Alastair Campbell was portrayed in the New Zealand media as somebody who was a spin doctor and you couldn’t necessarily believe anything he said, so no matter what he said it wasn’t believed. It was difficult for Alastair Campbell to get a position in terms of making statements on behalf of the Lions that was seen by the New Zealand media as having credibility because of his role in politics.’
Dave Barton, the press officer who had to firefight in New Zealand when England’s 2011 World Cup campaign disastrously imploded through a myriad of off-field shenanigans that included dwarf throwing at a Queenstown night club, will be Gatland’s PR strategist next summer but the task of getting a fair hearing will be difficult no matter who is managing the message.
‘How the New Zealand media portray teams coming into their country I don’t think it really matters what you do, they are going to say what they want,’ said McHugh.
‘They hone in on certain aspects of whatever it is they want to hone in on and it doesn’t matter what you do, they are still going to do that.’
There is no getting away from rugby in New Zealand, it’s so pervasive The Kiwis would not listen to what Alastair Campbell said