There was only so much snooker before the Duke went stir crazy
Anyone for cricket, or snooker, or cards, or golf ? Lions tours – even in defeat – are meant to be vibrant, fun and the pinnacle of your career and, perhaps, even life, but the 1977 tour was anything but. Sir Ian McGeechan once summed up the 1977 tour as “grim, doomed and an endless slog; it was interminable, not enjoyable in the slightest”.
When Bill Beaumont flew out as a replacement for Nigel Horton who had broken a thumb, the story goes that Willie Duggan took it on himself to go to the airport and greet the eager young Englishman. “If I was you Bill I would feck off back home on the first plane now, it’s dire,” were allegedly his first words to the fresh-faced young lock.
It started with the weather which was officially the third wettest winter in New Zealand history overall, but the wet stuff seemed to maliciously follow the Lions around the country and save its worst outburst for match days and big training sessions.
Trench foot was a very real possibility.
The elements were a big problem rugby-wise because although on paper there seemed plenty of quality in the Lions backs they badly needed the opportunity to gel and develop their moves and confidence. That luxury was never forthcoming and as the Lions got deeper into the tour it was a deficiency that was never rectified. By the end of the tour with Phil Bennett unusually hesitant at flyhalf the Lions backs often seemed to do little more than crab sideways from touchline to touchline.
And the weather was a massive problem moralewise. On tour for 14 or 15 weeks, training can only occupy an hour or two a
day at most. Nearly 12,000 miles away from home that leaves 22 hours a day you need to occupy yourself and in the Seventies small town hotels in New Zealand were limited in their amenities and cuisine to say the least. The players needed to get out and about or go stir-crazy and, alas, in some cases it was the latter.
Indoor cricket in school gyms, endless snooker or card-playing schools; sodden trips to flooded golf
courses, water polo for those who could swim, worthy school visits. It all got a bit too much as Bobby Windsor chronicled in his autobiography The Iron Duke.
“There was too much drinking on the tour and I include myself in that but at least I was in good company,” wrote Windsor, who recalls George Burrell offering him a dram when he went into the manager’s bedroom at 8.30am as duty boy to get the squad’s instruction for the day.
On one occasion before a midweek game against Counties-Thames Valley, Windsor and others who weren’t required went into Pukekohe for an all-nighter, getting back about 5.30 am. Much to his consternation he was woken at 9.30am with the message he was playing that afternoon because Peter Wheeler had gone down with flu.
“It’s just as well the ref didn’t have a breathalyser, if I’d been in a car they would have asked me to blow in the bag. Andy Dalton (his opposite number) reckoned every time he put his head in the scrum it smelt like a brewery.”
Despite packing down for the first time in Lions colours with his fellow Pontypool front row members Graham Price and Charlie Faulkner, Windsor unsurprisingly lost three strikes against the head although the Lions won easily enough 35-10.