Lions roar back after hell week

Two disrupted buildups, but one clear victor.

That was the story of Friday night’s Super Rugby contest between the Chiefs and Lions in Hamilton, where the desperate visitors prevailed 23-17.

The hosts have lost star utility back Damian McKenzie for the season, and fellow All Blacks Brodie Retallick and Nathan Harris, along with backline weapon Solomon Alaimalo, were all sidelined for this contest, but the Lions had a chaotic lead-in themselves.

Wing Courtnall Skosan flew home midweek to be with his gravely ill father, defence coach Joey Mongalo headed back for an internal disciplinary hearing as he was this week handed down an undisclosed sentence in a Sydney court after being found guilty of sexual assault from an incident in May last year, while head coach Swys de Bruin also boarded a plane home late in the piece for personal reasons.

What could have been an absolute shambles for the threetime runners-up, who had fallen to the bottom of the South African conference, in the end turned into one of their best efforts of the season. Springboks Malcolm Marx and Elton Jantjies had surprisingly been benched for the fixture, but ended up being late inclusions in the starting lineup, and the Lions went on to batter an error-ridden Chiefs team to the tune of a 20-0 first-half advantage, before holding out the home team’s comeback.

‘‘It’s been a tough week, the guys really managed to focus well for the 80 minutes and we started well,’’ said Ivan van Rooyen – the team’s strength and conditioning coach, and who coached them in last year’s Currie Cup – who was the one wheeled out for media duty post-match.

The reason Marx and Jantjies were promoted to start, van Rooyen said, was purely because of the week’s disruptions, and that they felt they needed the experience to get them off to a good start, while he was proud of how his players performed for their absent coach.

‘‘We’ve got a big family ethos back home, so it’s literally like losing a dad this week, so I think the performance shows you how much they care about him, how much we miss him.

‘‘The guys really put their body on the line defensively. There was a clear plan from the senior players, I think they stuck to that tonight.’’

Then there was the other side of the coin, with Chiefs coach Colin Cooper highly unimpressed with what he saw from a team whose winning run was halted at three.

‘‘Our game was poor,’’ he said. ‘‘We turned the ball over 21 times, they’re too good a team to do that [against].

‘‘It’s been a disruptive week, no doubt about that. But it’s still a good enough group to perform better than that.

‘‘We came back, and we could have snuck that game, but we turned the ball over at crucial times. And probably towards the end there we tried to kick a bit more than we should have, and probably in the first half we should have kicked it better, and more.’’

It added up to a forgettable night for halfback Brad Weber, who was captaining the side for the first time, noting it was ‘‘100 per cent’’ an opportunity missed, as away derbies against the Hurricanes and Highlanders await. ‘‘They tackled like beasts,’’ he said. ‘‘When we string phases together we usually break teams and score points.

‘‘Man, they were able to hold onto the ball for a long period of time. They actually taught us a lesson. We learnt pretty quickly, but not quite [quickly] enough.

‘‘But giving the team like the Lions 20 points, you’re going to make it tough for yourselves.

‘‘We felt like we were the team with the most energy going into that last 20 minutes. Man, if there was an extra five minutes, maybe we would have won the game.

‘‘To push them right to the end’s pleasing, but at the same time we need to be a hell of a lot better if we’re wanting to go a long way in this comp.’’

Cooper was able to diagnose Jack Debreczeni’s ailment as a concussion, after the luckless fullback filling in for McKenzie was stretchered off during the halftime break.

Meanwhile, there’s sure to be plenty of soul searching going on in the experiment of shifting Angus Ta’avao to loosehead, after he was heavily penalised for a second week in a row.

‘‘It was a smart tighthead pulling and pushing,’’ Cooper said of Ta’avao’s opposite, Carlu Sadie. ‘‘So I guess we’ll just have to relook at what we do there.

‘‘We’ll have to wait and see what the scrum coach [Nick White] thinks, and make those decisions.’’