Lions need jokers to entertain the pack
LET’s not beat about the bush, very little about the 2021 Lions in South Africa is going to be ideal or necessarily to our liking as rugby lovers, tourists, punters and TV consumers. Somethings are simply beyond sport’s control, a list topped I would suggest by a pernicious global pandemic.
But if the authorities can salvage anything from the wreckage – and reading between the lines there is still work to do – we should applaud them and the players. And if a tour of sorts can be organised around South Africa I would suggest it might go down as one of the most memorable in Lions history, certainly the most unusual.
Lions’ tours have often been ground-breaking and bloody hard work with the differing challenges of their time to surmount. That’s part of their rich history and heritage.
First, right up until 1950, they involved long sea voyages – six or seven weeks in the case of New Zealand – simply to get there and another seven weeks to get back.
Now we can romanticise these trips, high jinks on the Seven Seas, dress suits to dine at the captain’s table once a week – and they certainly had their moments. But often the reality was second or third-class travel in scruffy steamers, sharing dingy small cabins with unfamiliar new colleagues. Sea-sickness was an issue for some, boredom for others. A life on the ocean wave does not, and did not, suit everybody.
Such voyages could also make or break a party. Travelling the other way, the first All Blacks tourists of 1905 famously staged a midocean mutiny, with many South Islanders unhappy at the appointment of veteran Auckland man Dave Gallaher as captain.
Army man Gallaher nipped that in the bud and spent the rest of the voyage working his party so hard in the ship’s makeshift gym that they lacked the energy to cause any more trouble.
The Lions’ problem was more the reverse, arriving in New Zealand in a state of extreme unfitness and torpor, with four or five matches required before anybody was remotely at the required level of fitness.
Until the early 60s the majority of travel within South Africa and New Zealand was by train. Some were reasonably kitted out, but most were wooden seated rattlers with no buffet or catering. Happily the tradition developed for the train to stop at a pre-designated station where the local Union or rotary club would lay on an al fresco lunch or supper on trestle tables lined down the station platform.
Hotels were rudimentary to say the least and the weather could be extreme. The tour parties were small. The 35-match tour of New Zealand and Australia in 1888 was undertaken by 22 players. That’s a big workload for a very small party. Medical back up was nonexistent. Three minute phone calls home once a fortnight.
And politics can intrude. The 1903 tour to South Africa, led by Scotland’s Mark Morrison, took place months after the end of the Second Boer war and three years’ bitter hostilities between the British Empire and the Boers in South Africa. It was a tad tense to say the least on occasions with some of their opponents only recently out of British POW camps on St Helena and Sri Lanka.
And remember until 1997 all Lions tourists were amateurs which meant, in the early days, leaving family, friends and jobs for up to seven months. These tours were no picnic even if those concerned, as is always the case, tended to recall only the good times in later life.
The challenges this summer are going to be formidable and possibly the most demanding in history but I will venture a modest wager that in 100 years’ time it will be one of the Lions tours everybody talks about.
There will be a quarantine period on arrival and the entire party will have to operate in a bubble from start to finish and in such a beautiful sun-kissed land as South Africa this will be excruciating. As an allround package South Africa is THE tour.
No trips or socials, no looking up friends, no family or friends swinging by for a coffee or a meal, no mixing with fans on nights out, no socialising with the opposition. No cultural trips, no piss ups other than in the hotel bar where it will be the same faces every night. It will need to be a larger than normal party because flying replacements in is not a practical option.
No travelling red army of fans and although players world wide have coped brilliantly with the lack of a live audience the modern day Lions feed off their supporters like no other team in the sport.
It will be touring, but not as we know it. But it’s the reality and everybody must buy in and adapt, or frankly put their hands up and say “this is not for me”. That in turn will throw even more emphasis on Warren Gatland getting his selections right. This tour party needs to be tighter than ever.
Everybody will be confined in the tight bubble and there will be an onus on good amusing tourists who galvanise the group. Who is the modern day Cliff Morgan, Keith Wood, Jason Leonard or John Bentley?
Who can play the piano and lead a sing song, preside over an amusing players court, organise a quiz night or a cabaret evening with each nation required to produce a couple of turns? It might seem artificial to some of the modern generation but frankly what is the alternative?
The worst possible thing for a tour party operating under a Covid bubble would be to disappear into their rooms and spend endless hours on their computers and smart phones. It’s a little different for the Test match cricketers, they are with each other all the time for five long days on the bounce.
On a rugby tour doing stuff together is vital even if it’s just a meal out at the Italian down the road a couple of evenings a week. That option won’t be available, but the Lions need to fill that vacuum themselves.