LIONS ROAR
Tourists primed for first test
In beating the Maori with considerable ease, the Lions took rugby back a few decades in Rotorua but themselves forward a number of significant steps.
They will feel ready for the All Blacks on Saturday night at Eden Park in Auckland now, having established all the key parts of their game are in good order.
They crushed the life out of the Maori All Blacks. It was like watching someone sit on a balloon, the pressure building towards the inevitable pop.
There was no finesse or mystique about it. The Lions rolled up their sleeves in the style of an officious hospital matron dealing with her ward and clinically went about their business.
Functional, direct, confrontational and focused — they were all of those things, and while it was a victory for the Lions, it may be not so much a win for rugby.
Romantics everywhere would be sobbing into their soup at the relentless, grinding nature of it all, but this is how the Lions want to be: this is how they think they can beat the All Blacks. Maybe they will, but they have signalled loud and clear what they will be bringing and they have to hope their one trick is going to be good enough.
If the Lions have something up their sleeve for the tests, there's a fair chance it won't be anything too thrilling. Imaginative rugby isn't their bag. Creativity as New Zealanders understand it isn't in their thinking. Isn't in their system. It's just not in any part of their picture.
There was, once again, no desire from the Lions to open up the game with ball in hand. They didn't want to push things wide — partly because they were not so comfortable out there and partly because that was exactly where the Maori wanted them to go.
So instead, with all the surprise of a Russian election, the big runners came off the ruck and hit it up. It was bump, recycle, bump, recycle.
Lineout ball was mostly driven. Taken well, hidden in the throng and then walked up the field. It got them going forward, but in a World War I sort of way — hard-fought inches at a time with the potential for casualties always there.
It was trench warfare. None of it was unexpected, and of course Conor Murray, Johnny Sexton and Leigh Halfpenny pitched in with their aerial bombardment. When they were out of ideas, up went the ball and it was chase, chase, chase.
It was an unquestionably good way to stifle the Maori. It was a great way to put them under pressure, keep them pinned down in areas of the field they didn't want to be.
The Lions scrum was finally doing what it should be doing, too. There was plenty of power coming through and early in the second half, they
were in total control there. That's their happy place after all — scrummaging for penalties.
The whole combination worked. The Lions owned the game. They played at their pace, in Maori territory and they were able to extract penalties and keep the scoreboard moving in multiples of three, but still moving enough to turn the screw and create the platform for the tries to come.
The Maori All Blacks helped them in the application of pressure, not dealing nearly well enough with the high balls when they rained down.
The Maori All Blacks never found cohesion or flow and their discipline frayed the longer the game went on.
New Zealand Maori 10 (L. Messam try; D. McKenzie con, pen) British and Irish Lions 32 (Penalty try, M. Itoje try; L. Halfpenny 6 pens, 2 cons). Halftime: 10-12.