The sterile Lions Tests are killing the game
You have to laugh, even in the darkness. It’s better than the alternative. After countless stackings of the deck in favour of attack over defence by World Rugby, we have just been subjected to the most sterile, poverty-stricken Test series in well over a century of officially-sanctioned British and Irish Lions business trips. Six tries in three matches? Whoopee doo. Hang out the bunting.
The Lions are no strangers to playing in crimson-stained straitjackets rather than red jerseys: way back in 1968, they managed only a single try across four meetings with the Springboks, scored in Pretoria by none other than Willie John McBride at his…er… exhilarating, devil-may-care best.
If we’re being generous to the point of absurdity, we can at least celebrate the latest tourists’ doubling of that miserable tally.
It is also the case that they emerged from this most blighted of adventures in far better shape than the 1974 Boks, who also found themselves stuck on the most singular of single figures – a try by the centre Peter Cronje in the final, drawn Test in Johannesburg – and in so doing, staked an irrefutable claim to the title of “worst South African team in history”: an outfit almost as pointless in the literal sense as they had been in the metaphorical one.
But it is rare indeed to witness two sides suffering from collective agoraphobia at the same time and stifling each other into submission with equally conservative brands of riskfree anti-rugby. Sadly, this was the fare on offer over the last three weekends and unsurprisingly, it resulted in the lowest try-count of any Lions series since the first official venture way back when in 1910.
If the Springboks had selected the hilariously feral back rower Jasper Wiese in all 15 positions and lost their entire side to simultaneous yellow cards, the Lions would have found a way of running into the referee. After all, if passing the ball into space is against your religion, contact is the only form of salvation.
True believers in the Lions concept – do not expect to read the loathsome word “brand” in this corner of the paper, even though you’ve just read it – argue that along with the World Cup, it is the headline event of the entire sport. And they are correct: Rugby Union loses the Lions at its peril. But if what we have just seen is the best the game has to offer, we’re gathering speed on the road to nowhere.
It is wholly unrealistic to believe that every Lions trip to South Africa should meet the standard set in 1955, when the Tony O’Reillys and Cliff Morgans and Tom van Vollenhovens and Basie van Wyks showed the best of themselves in a 26-try Test series that never once descended into a cheap version of rugby basketball.
Much as World Rugby would love to
“Neither the Springboks nor the Lions gave the slightest indication that they wanted to ‘play’”
recapture all that style and swagger, such magical mystery tours went the way of the Druids when the sport turned professional, the abolition of the ruck turned pitches into postage stamps and the top teams began importing defence systems from the “other” rugby code.
Nowadays, everyone knows too much about everyone else to be surprised by anything. Jonah Lomu may have been the last true shock to the game’s system.
Yet this is not quite as dire as it sounds. A Lions series can stimulate all the senses even when tries are snow leopard-rare: there weren’t too many to be seen in New Zealand in 1977 or, after the First Test, in Australia in 1989, yet those campaigns live in the memory.
The sadness this time was that neither the Springboks nor the Lions gave the slightest indication that they wanted to “play”. They both wanted to “win”, of course, but that’s a different thing entirely. The Wallabies and the French were equally keen on winning during the lower-intensity but infinitely more captivating series that preceded events in South Africa, but they could not have gone about it more differently. Attitude is all.
World Rugby must be deeply concerned by the spectacle, or lack of it, in Cape Town. Let’s face it: if the nongoverning governing body isn’t concerned, there is even more wrong with it than we think.
But the sporting legislators who have already produced a law book so complicated that it makes the HMRC tax guide read like Winnie the Pooh will come up short if they attempt to double down on their misguided efforts to “encourage attacking play” by indulging in another round of tinkering with regulations and variations. As experimenters, they have been about as successful as Frankenstein.
The game is crying out for fewer laws, not more of them. It yearns for simplicity. More than anything, it craves a change of mindset.
“Back play at speed is becoming a pathetic apology, an insult to those who have graced the game for a century,” said Carwyn James, Saint Carwyn of Stradey, at some point in the 1980s. “Flat-footed forwards now stand at centre. I ask you!! And crowds clap aimless kicks ahead – and pay £12 for the privilege.”
As they pay a lot more now, there will come a point when the clapping stops. Rugby Union has an awful lot of thinking to do.