Jones makes powerful case to lead Lions
While rivals to be tour captain are faltering, the veteran is playing a key role in Wales’ pursuit of slam
‘Alun Wyn drives everything. Standards in the team room, on the training pitch, how you speak’
Warren Gatland will be in Dublin on Saturday, where the Six Nations contest between Ireland and England will no doubt go a long way to settling several outstanding places in his British and Irish Lions squad.
Yet it now seems almost certain that Gatland’s captain for the tour will be in Paris.
When it comes to selection, the Lions head coach puts huge store in observing how players react under the pressure of the big Six Nations encounters, particularly away from home.
And should Wales go on to complete their second Grand Slam in three years with victory against France on Saturday night, their inspirational leader, Alun Wyn Jones, would have earned the right to be the Lions tour captain.
At the start of the championship I predicted the Lions captaincy was likely to boil down to a choice between Owen Farrell and Maro Itoje. But England faltered, Farrell struggled for form and had his leadership style questioned, while Itoje’s discipline came under examination.
The brilliant victory over France last Saturday is almost certain to have salvaged the Lions hopes of several players, but in terms of the captaincy,
Jones’s role in transforming the fortunes of a Wales team who lost seven Tests in 2020 is overwhelming.
Critically, he has been able to defy those who questioned whether at the age of 35 he had enough left in his tank to be a strong Test contender on a Lions tour. He is in a hugely competitive position, with Itoje, James Ryan, Iain Henderson and Jonny Gray all pushing hard, but Gatland knows Jones best of all, and will have noted that his relentless standards on and off the field, and his remarkable levels of fitness, do not appear to have dropped. Despite an eight-week lay-off for a knee injury sustained in the Autumn Nations Cup match against Italy in December, Jones set the tone with an 80-minute performance in Wales’s victory over Ireland in the opening round of the Six Nations and has not looked back. The victory over Italy in Rome on Saturday was only the seventh time he has not played a full 80 minutes in the 47 times he has captained Wales.
“He is still setting records in training and certainly keeping up his standards,” said one observer. “Alun Wyn drives everything. Standards in the team room, standards on the training pitch, standards on how you speak to the press. He drives everything. His leadership is not dictatorial. Players just follow him because those players see the standards that he sets.”
The rising stars in the squad, such as Louis Rees-zammit, have been left in no doubt about the commitment that is required for international rugby by seeing Jones spend his day off on a
Wednesday undertaking double recovery sessions and squeezing every ounce out of the resources available in the Wales camp to speed up his recovery after games. Consistency is at the core of his preparation, performance and leadership.
“He wasn’t involved in the squad for the match against Georgia in the Autumn Nations Cup but he still wanted to help prepare the team the same way as he would expect the fringe players to do for him,” said one source.
“As a player with 150-odd caps he could have put his feet up but he had the same levels of energy and dedication in training. He is always keen on praising the players who are not in the match-day squad.”
That is a key attribute for a Lions captain and in that sense, Jones has many of the same qualities that Gatland so admired in Sam Warburton, his captain for the tours of Australia and New Zealand in 2013 and 2017.
Warburton did not start the first Test in New Zealand in 2017 because he had been recovering from an ankle injury but his leadership as the tour captain was in no way diminished.
Jones, the world’s most capped player with 156 caps, also benefits from the wealth of experience that comes with playing in all nine Test matches on the past three tours.
Jones will make history on Saturday if Wales complete a Grand Slam that few predicted at the start of this championship and becomes the first Welsh player to win four slams, having also won the championship in 2013.
“He doesn’t deliver mammoth speeches, people just follow him. Players follow his lead,” said another source.
They used to say the same thing about Martin Johnson, another quietly spoken warrior second row who went on to captain the Lions tour of South Africa. And that worked out OK.
In word and deed, Rachael Blackmore proves that she is just what her anguished sport needs. Modest to a fault, tactically astute, thrillingly talented, the pride of Tipperary also gives a bracing rebuke to the notion that jockeys must still be viewed through the prism of gender.
“It doesn’t matter what you are,” she said, riding Honeysuckle back past the deserted Cheltenham grandstands, newly minted as the first woman to ride a Champion Hurdle winner in the race’s 94 years. “We’re jockeys, we’re winning races, it’s just a privilege to be here.”
Her dignified restraint reminds that it is time, quite frankly, to ditch the preconception that ability in the saddle must be dictated by chromosomes. All too often, these are the first questions fielded by Blackmore or by Bryony Frost in the wake of a significant victory. How does it feel to make history as a woman? What message would you like to send to all the little girls out there? Blackmore, quite rightly, shrugs off these lines of inquiry with borderline distaste, determined to conjure history on her own terms.
This was a win as emphatic as anyone could have wished, as Blackmore elevated her partnership with Honeysuckle to fresh heights, surging clear of Sharjah and Epatante with an unstoppable turn of speed up the hill.
While it was a trailblazing moment for women, it was one of which the 31-year-old knew she was more than capable, as she propelled Henry de Bromhead’s remarkable mare to an 11th consecutive success. The only regret was that the Cheltenham roar could not be summoned to mark another of racing’s glass ceilings being shattered.
Then again, they are being broken so quickly that the sport can no longer keep pace. First, Frost becomes the first female to register a Grade One win, in the 2019 Ryanair Chase, then Blackmore arrives just two years later to scatter the competition in the Champion Hurdle. Put it another way: it took until 1984 for a female rider even to appear in a Gold Cup, in the shape of Linda Sheedy, on a 500-1 shot. On Friday, Frost, on her beloved Frodon, is a plausible each-way bet to win one.
The landscape has been redrawn
It is time to ditch the preconception that ability must be dictated by chromosomes
beyond recognition. At last, an acknowledgement of parity is being forced by the sheer skill of the women in the weighing room. It is the same on the Flat: Hollie Doyle, having surged to wider notice last year, is continuing the trend this season, riding a fivetimer at Kempton just two weeks ago. It was just unfortunate that such a feat had to be overshadowed by the idiocy of Gordon Elliott sitting on a dead horse.
Briefly, Elliott threatened to be the story again on Cheltenham’s opening afternoon, as the fittinglynamed Black Tears sealed a first winner of the week for Denise Foster, standing in for the disgraced Elliott. Still, this episode of darkness could not overwhelm Blackmore’s rhapsody in light blue silks. Of late, racing has given too many reasons for despair. But one woman as gifted as she is selfeffacing has produced a moment to relish.