How will this year’s Lions team and tour compare to those of the past?
Warren Gatland will announce his Lions selection on Thursday. Speculation will give way to approval from some, recrimination from others. There will be nine matches, including a pre-tour international against Japan in Edinburgh on June 26. The eight games in South Africa, will – all being well – run from July 7 to August 7, with the three Tests coming on successive weeks.
Gatland will name thirty-six players and perhaps some on a reserve list. Since there is more rugby to be played till they board the plane to South Africa, it’s probable that a few of those named on Thursday will perforce be left behind. George North would likely have been among the thirty six, but he is already out, having damaged a cruciate ligament in a club match last weekend.
Thirty six players is six more than the Lions Party that set off for a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1959. That team would play two Tests in Australia and four in New Zealand. The 1950 Lions had travelled by sea, but the 1959 ones flew. They also played two matches in Canada on the way home, a total of thirty three altogether. That is as many as you now get in three Lions tours in the professional era. The 1959 Lions were away from home for five months. No wonder some players had reluctantly declared themselves unavailable.
Gatland will be taking a handful of coaches, trainers, medical staff with him. The 1959 Lions had no coach; the administrative staff consisted of a manager, a secretary-assistant and a baggage-master. It would be another 12 years and two tours before the Lions had a coach. The first was Carwyn James and that was the first tour on which the Lions won the Test series in New Zealand. No doctor or physiotherapist travelled with the team. In 1971, however, the tour manager, Doug Smith, who had played on the wing for Scotland and the 1950 Lions, was a General Practitioner in London – though it wasn’t for his medical knowledge that he was made manager.
Of course thirty players – fifteen forwards and fifteen backs – weren’t enough. Injuries curtailed some players’ tours; replacements had to be flown out. Three of the thirty never managed to play at all and had to be sent home. Injuries were as always frequent, and in the days before replacements were permitted for a player who had to leave the field, there were matches when they finished with only thirteen men. Improvisation was necessary. There was one provincial match in which the Lions were so short of fit players that they had to field two forwards in the three-quarter line. Ken Scotland, picked as one of the two full-backs in the party, found himself also at fly-half, centre and even scrum-half.
Even when most about this tour is forgotten – naturally enough – the First Test is often recalled as a travesty of justice. New Zealand won 18-17. Their great full-back Don Clarke kicked six penalty goals. The Lions scored four tries, converting one of them and kicking one penalty. With modern scoring values – 5 points for a try now as against 3 then – the Lions would have won 25-18. As a further twist of the knife, the Lions were leading 17-9 with ten minutes left, whereupon the New Zealand referee – no neutral ones then – awarded the All Blacks three penalties in quick succession, all of which Clarke of course kicked. One was dubious. One seemed to the Lions touch judge – no neutral touch-judges either – to go over the top of the post or even just wide.
Covid-related restrictions will, of course, make this a very different Lions tour from even the other professional ones, let alone the amateur days. It’s a tour that is probably more necessary for South Africa than it is for British and Irish rugby. In truth, there are a number of us who think that, given all the difficulties, pain and upheaval of the last year, we could have done without it. But the counter argument is that South Africa have played no international rugby since the World Cup and that even their provincial teams have been confined to domestic rugby. Of course, a fair number of the team that won the World Cup in Japan have been playing club rugby in England or France. But if, as the Rugby Football Union (RFU)’s review of the Six Nations seemed to suggest, England were undercooked in this year’s tournament, South Africa are unlikely to be as well prepared for a Lions series as one would in normal times expect them to be.
Overall, the Lions have a better record in South Africa than in New Zealand. The first post-World War II series in 1955 was tied, two wins a- piece. Matches in 1962 and 1968 were both lost. In the brief glory days of the Lions, 1974 was won but 1980 lost. Then came the long years of South African exclusion until apartheid was abolished, and Ian McGeechan’s team won in 1997. In 2000 we saw a close series, South Africa winning 2-1; margins in all matches being narrow. Heavy defeats have been rarer for the Lions in South Africa than in New Zealand, and the probability is that this summer’s series will also be close.
What it won’t be is the sort of wonderful adventure the long tours of the amateur days were, even though the 1959 one I have been recalling took place when the laws of the game were very heavily tilted in favour of defence. In the Spring of that year, matches in what was then the Five Nations, saw on average only one try a game. This makes some of the adventurous back-play of that 1959 Lions team all the more remarkable. I trust it’s not too much to hope for a similar sense of adventure come July. Given present circumstances, this is surely a time when the way the game is played matters more than the result.
I should say that my memories of the 1959 tour have been revived and sharpened by reading Ken Scotland’s autobiography at the tail-end of last year. It gives a fine picture of what the amateur game was like, one that will astonish many readers today. I should also disclose that I wrote an introduction to the book, and, finally, remark that Ken is a modest man, more ready to speak of mistakes he made than to indulge in self-praise. But he was a marvellous player, one of the finest I have watched and known.