Bad blarney from O’Brien
Maybe Sean O’Brien had his head damaged scoring that wonderful 90m try for the Lions against the All Blacks this season.
It was a cracker, the best of the series — and it absolutely blew away contentions from uninformed critics that the Lions were incapable of playing expansive rugby. One even said: “. . . the kick-chase-squeezepenalty game is probably the only way this Lions outfit can beat the All Blacks — with chokehold rugby, parasitically feeding off mistakes as the opponents (and the game) run out of oxygen — as opposed to fashioning something themselves.”
Who was that idiot? Oh, all right, it was me.
But now SOB — inconvenient initials, those, when you examine what they mean in other parts of the world — has claimed the Lions should have beaten the All Blacks 3-0 in the series if they’d been coached properly. That prompted Lions coach Warren Gatland to say he hated the tour and had been discomfited by some of the negativity of the New Zealand media.
Let’s deal with SOB first. 3-0 to the Lions? Sean’s scrum cap must have slipped off while he was scoring his try, exposing his brain to the elements.
If Beauden Barrett had had his kicking boots on, the All Blacks would have won the second test, even down to 14 men. In the third test, there was the little matter of a dropped pass by Julian Savea, more kicking misses by Barrett, missed opportunities by others — even before that French refereeing mess at the end.
So anything other than an analysis suggesting that the series result should have been 3-0 to the All Blacks is steeped in what Andy Haden used to say to rugby scribes outside Auckland: “Do you think your perspective is affected by your regional bias?”
No, Sean, credit where it is due. The Lions drew the series against the All Blacks — the second best result in Lions history in this country; Gatland can forever quote that fact. Having heavy legs and being over-trained had very little to do with the result. There was, after all, no sign of heavy legs and over-training in O’Brien’s try and in that heroic defence, even though Gatland remarkably conceded O’Brien might have had a point.
O’Brien wanted, he said, to make sure things were better “going forward”.
His remarks led to Gatland tossing in the towel as Lions coach, so all O’Brien really achieved was to illustrate players can quite safely slag off the coach once the tour is over and their selection on the next Lions tour is not an issue.
Gatland wasn’t immune from flexible remembrances. He recalled the New Zealand Herald headline that disgusted him as “Gatland aims at Barbarians’ weakness — his son”. A search through Herald digital archives yielded no such headline.
“Gatland v Gatland — Bryn first piece in test jigsaw” was the Herald piece run on the day.
Maybe he didn’t like the contention that he had told power No 12 Ben Teo to run at his son.
But just a minute . . . this is international rugby. If there was a fault in the Herald story, it may have been that there was no corroboration re the Teo reference — but I will bet you the Taj Mahal to a teabag that someone in the Lions will have given Teo licence to run at the new boy. As I recall it, Gatland junior played rather well.
Maybe the Herald’s caricature of Gatland as a clown was a bridge (of the red nose) too far but was the socalled campaign of negativity as bad as all that?
“Sumo”, as he was known in the All Blacks during his long deputyship to Sean Fitzpatrick, is a Kiwi. He surely knows his countrymen are apt to be over-sensitive when the former colonial overlords come to town.
Gatland also surely knows the treatment handed out to World Cup winner Sir Clive Woodward in 2005 was far more vicious. Woodward paid the penalty for trying to massage a losing Lions tour with slippery PR spin — and was roundly chastised by everybody.
“Sir Clive Woodward was revealed as a coach with a strategy rooted in a time warp in 2003 and the highlyflawed concept of a test team chosen on reputation, with the novel technique of not allowing them to play together to develop combinations and rhythm. It’s a truism that a PR strategy can only work if the core strategy does. If not, PR professionals end up doing what they describe as ‘polishing the turd’.”
So thundered one unforgiving scribe. Oh, all right, me again . . .
It’s easy to admire Gatland for his openness in discussing the tour and its flaws — but you do wonder whether positioning himself as a victim is the right way to go.