Lions have mountain to climb

Facing the world champions on their own turf with only six weeks preparation will be some task.

The thought occurred over the last two Lions odysseys to Australia and New Zealand that they made the perfect tourists. They made money for the brand name and hosts alike, bringing 50,000 supporters or so to swell the coffers of the local economy, and then duly lost. Sir Clive Woodward, without the checks or sounding boards of Martin Johnson, sadly got things spectacularly wrong.

Everything was done on the grandest of scales, from an overly numerous 44-man squad and two-tiered coaching staff which made achieving an homogenous sense of unity almost impossible, to the appointment of Alastair Campbell to head up the team of spin doctors. Aside from all the baggage which the former advisor to Tony Blair brought to the party, the All Blacks had mostly legitimate weapons of mass destruction. And even the attempt to spin Speargate on a daily basis achieved the improbable feat of making the All Blacks more vengeful after winning the first Test than the Lions. Quite a feat alright.

Ian McGeechan must have watched events unfold from the standpoint of overseeing the midweek team with a curious eye, and is now returning as head coach for a fourth time -three times more than anyone else. He has attempted to restore much of the Lions’ old values, starting with a more streamlined 37-man squad (helped by South Africa being more accessible, in fairness) and coaching staff.

Coming into this series on the back of five successive Test match defeats, the Lions are due a Test series win to restore their credibility. The problem, of course, is that so are South Africa. Nothing appears to grate with the Springboks and their supporters more than the memory of their 1997 series loss to the Lions. Then, the Boks had also been crowned World Cup champions two years before, and McGeechan masterfully coached the Lions. But all else has changed, changed utterly.

For starters, McGeechan had the luxury of a 13-match programme. Picking Lions’ teams before the first tour match is usually a futile exercise, because form, injuries and the way players react to this unique environment shows that pre-conceived notions are usually misplaced. Who would have had Tom Smith, Paul Wallace, Jeremy Davidson, even Jeremy Guscott and others in the first Test starting line-up 12 years ago?

Four years ago in New Zealand, there were only 11 matches in total and six before the first Test as well as the (ominously drawn) tour warm-up against Argentina in Cardiff. So Woodward largely went with a pre-ordained Test team built around ill-prepared and/or out of form veterans of his English World Cup winning side two years before.

This time round, McGeechan has only six of the ten matches before the first Test on June 20th with which to formulate his team. What’s more, whereas two of the Tests were played at sea level a dozen years ago, both the second and third Tests, in Pretoria and Johannesburg, will be played at altitude, as Cape Town has been overlooked for the first time in over a century.

The Springboks will also be in nothing like the bedraggled and misdirected shape they were in ‘97. Then, their totemic and talismanic 1995 World Cup-winning captain Francois Pienaar had been eased out along with many of that team, the All Blacks had won a series there for the first time in ’96, their newly-installed coach Andre Markgraaff had been removed for making racist remarks and his replacement, Carel du Plessis, chopped and changed an unsettled team without a reliable goalkicker to lose the series 2-1 despite scoring nine tries to three.

Then, too, McGeechan both pulled off a masterstroke, and got away with it, accommodating a goalkicking outhalf, Neil Jenkins, at full back.

This time round, Jake White may have moved on but the Boks’ World Cup-winning squad is not only largely intact but their frontliners have clearly been tailoring the intervening two years with this tour in mind.

Coming as it does every dozen years, a tilt at the Lions has eluded many of the game’s most stellar names, be they Danie Gerber, Mark Ella or Wayne Shelford. For the chosen few, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and for the likes of John Smit, Victor Matfield, Bakkies Botha, Schalk Burger, Fourie du Preez, Bryan Habana et al, avenging the ’97 loss would be the crowing glory on top of their World Cup win.

Head coach Peter de Villiers appears a good deal more volatile than White, and his assistants, Dick Muir and Gary Gold, are relatively inexperienced too, although Gold has the experience of working with London Irish in the Premiership and Heineken Cup.

Yet they have kept a successful team largely intact, and aside from the winning second row combination of Matfield and Botha, an awesomely physical and athletic backrow of Burger, Juan Smith and Pierre Spies, they have an embarrassment of backline riches. Depending on the ravages of the Super 14, the one question mark, perhaps, is the number ten jersey in the absence of the sidelined Butch James.

However the world champions have been simmering along nicely, winning all seven of their meetings with northern hemisphere countries since beating England in the 2007 final in Paris, including four wins over Wales and an historic, ruthless and record 42-6 win over England at Twickenham in November last year. And since that World Cup final, Wales’ 21-18 win at home to Australia remains the only victory by a European country over one of the three Tri-Nations teams in 21 meetings.

It is a further measure of the task facing the Lions that the only occasions in which the Sprinbboks have lost a home Test series were to the Lions in 1974 and ’97, and those All Blacks of ‘96.

McGeechan, unsurprisingly, has sought to put his own stamp on proceedings by appointing Paul O’Connell to emulate two other locks, Willie John McBride and Martin Johnson, ahead of Brian O’Driscoll, the first grand Slam-winning captain in a Lions’ year not to be chosen by the selectors to lead the tourists.

O’Connell will bring his trademark honesty of effort and approach to what will be, undoubtedly, the most daunting challenge of his career, and he will need all his lieutenants - the likes of O’Driscoll, Stephen Jones or Ronan O’Gara, Phil Vickery, Martyn Williams - to remain fit and in form. While the cruel and spiteful injury to O’Driscoll in the opening exhanges of the first Test probably did for the Lions four years ago, their goose was already sizzling with the loss of Lawrence Dallaglio in the tour opener.

The initial absence of the other three home union captains from the original party of 37 underlines the relative lack of obvious leadership in the squad. Just as critical therefore will be the need for others to flourish and emerge in this unique environment and rise to the occasion, a la Smith, Wallace, Davidson and Guscott in ‘97.

Judging by their squad selection, McGeechan and his think tank are clearly seeking to meet South Africa head-on in the physical collisions, which they are obliged to do. But they will also then need to come up with something extra, a tactical surprise or two, and an unexpected hero or two. Aside from Johnson, that team of ’97 also had a core of hardened English winners in Richard Hill, Neil Back, Dallaglio and Matt Dawson, but it would be another six years before they reached England’s Holy Grail of the William Webb Ellis trophy.

For most of the protagonists, on both sides, this will be a career-defining couple of months. That’s the cruel, wonderful beauty of Lions tours. This odyssey will be the making of some players, and perhaps the breaking of others.