>> Cain: Time to stop walking all over Lions

THERE are times when you wonder whether the current generation of administrators are leading the game straight to the knackers yard. This week’s virtual Press conference with the Lions managing director, Ben Calveley, was a case in point.

There was a shroud of wishful thinking around Calveley as he tried to explain why an extra fixture against Japan at Murrayfield was a huge benefit to the Lions a week before the start of their 2021 tour of South Africa.

Calveley had already made the mistake of trying to claim it would give Warren Gatland and his squad, “as much meaningful preparation as possible”. He compounded the error by presenting the fixture, on June 26 in Edinburgh, as an integral part of the tour, despite it happening over 9,000 miles north of Cape Town, the destination for the opening game of the tour proper, where the Lions face the Stormers the following Saturday.

Calveley’s contention that the 2021 Lions tour is now nine matches rather than eight is a misrepresentation, as is his argument about meaningful preparation. As it stands, Gatland will not be able to select a Lions side to play against Japan which includes any players from England, the country that had the largest contingent in the original 2017 squad to New Zealand, providing 15 out of the 40 players.

This is because the Lions have scheduled the Japan match on the same Saturday as the Premiership final, and PRL have so far refused to release any England players during the club window, as is their right under World Rugby’s regulation 9.

If the England contingent is of a similar size when the 2021 Lions squad is picked, it means that Gatland’s preparations for Japan will be spiked with 37.5 per cent of his squad unavailable. This makes a nonsense of presenting the tacked-on Test as a bonus for the Lions, when in reality it could be more of a handicap.

Pre-tour Lions training/match preparation is about bringing together the combined strength of the squad and assessing which players adapt best and fastest to the Lions requirements.

There are also big question marks over the choice of Japan as opposition in preparation for South Africa. While Japan proved at the 2019 World

Cup that their credentials for fast, free-flowing attacking rugby are unquestionable, their style of play is almost the diametric opposite of the aggressive big-bash power the Lions will face as soon as they set foot in South Africa.

The Lions would have done better to have invited a heavy-duty side selected from an equivalent to the Four Home Unions, like a combined France, Georgia, Argentina, and Italy, to examine their set piece credentials, and to hit them hard in contact in every area that South Africa will.

The objective of the 2021 Lions is first and last to beat the world champions, and a farewell try-fest jamboree against Japan will be about as useful in that regard as using cavalry against Panzer tanks.

However, as you might expect from a former RFU head of strategy and corporate affairs, Calveley appears to be as focused on a potential £10m bonanza in hospitality/gate money from the Japan international as he is on beating the Springboks. It makes you question whether he, and the rest of the Lions board, have considered that the potential benefits of a series win over South Africa will dwarf any takings from a one-off match against Japan.

The Lions have to get their priorities right, or risk extinction. Despite reports by each Lions manager and coach on every tour since the game went professional – 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013 and 2017 – demanding greater preparation time, tours have been massively reduced. The eight weeks in 1997 have been slashed to five weeks in 2021, which is the shortest tour in their history.

When I asked Calveley this week if he had accepted that from now onwards Lions tours would be squeezed into five weeks, he obfuscated, saying that it had been decided by World Rugby’s 2016 San Francisco accord – a half-baked plan for a new global season – which was held before he was appointed as managing director in April 2018.

When pressed for an answer Calveley, despite more than two years in the job, answered: “I don’t think it’s right to talk now about future tours…”.

He stalled again on whether there was a contingency, in case a Covid pandemic resurgence in South Africa led to a cancellation, to take the tour elsewhere, emphasising instead that South Africa’s infection and mortality rate has been lower than in the UK.

The Lions MD also disagreed that truncated tours could reduce the appeal of the Lions to players, especially if they felt they had a reduced chance of making the Test team due to fewer matches.

Calveley countered that, including Japan, there were six matches before the Tests, adding: “If you go back to New Zealand, that wasn’t the case, because you had fewer matches happening before the first Test. And, of course, if you’re playing in midweek before the first Test, it’s unlikely you would have made the first Test squad.”

This is factually incorrect. There were six matches before the first Test in 2017, all in New Zealand. The last of them, the 34-6 win over the Chiefs, was four days before the first Test. From that match, head coach Gatland chose two players – Liam Williams and Elliot Daly – who were not only in the starting line-up for the first Test, but played the entire series, making a telling impact. Another, Courtney Lawes, played strongly off the bench in the last two Tests. Both Gatland and the 2017 tour manager, John Spencer, called the preparation offered by their cramped tour schedule woefully inadequate, and yet this time it is even worse. Calveley, who now sits on World Rugby’s recently convened advisory talking-shop, the Professional Game Forum, agrees that the Lions are the “pinnacle” of the game.

Yet, in two years he has been unable to persuade the South African Rugby Union, which, along with the SA government, will be multi-million pound beneficiaries of the tour, to move their schedule back by a single week to give the Lions breathing space.

Calveley, and the Lions board, should attend urgently to the core business of winning the series against the Springboks – and if that takes advising SA Rugby to move the tour back a week or leave it in jeopardy, so be it.

Their duty is to give the Lions squad best possible preparation for the task, rather than focusing on the commercial business of extracting every last penny from a ‘brand’ they are in danger of squeezing dry.

“The benefits of a series win over South Africa will dwarf takings from a one-off match against Japan”