If former SA rugby boss Danie Craven was still alive, I could imagine him tut-tutting the words “I told you so, I always said that money would eat up rugby’s soul”.
Craven was the rugby personality I remember speaking the most back in the amateur era about the potential evils of professionalism. While I disagreed with him then and would still disagree with him now, it would be easy to feel his exasperation at the way money seems to be having the dominant say on this year’s scheduled British and Irish Lions tour.
For if it is true that the series will be played in the UK and Ireland, then it would have to be conceded that maybe Craven did have a point all those years ago. Of course the sport had to go professional, Doc would probably even concede that, but this would certainly talk to the concern Craven feared the most — the sport selling its soul for money.
Everyone I speak to when the Lions tour is mentioned, be they South African, British or Irish, agrees with what former Lions captain Willie John McBride said several weeks ago: If it doesn’t happen in SA, then it isn’t a Lions tour.
Yes, unless we’ve been living on Mars for the past 12 months, we understand the challenges faced by world rugby. Nothing is quite normal right now, nor will it be for some time to come. Desperate times do sometimes demand desperate measures.
But surely somewhere in sport, even in this professional age and in these times of Covid, there should be recognition of the need to keep sacrosanct some core elements of what people hold dear about the sport they follow? In sport, context is everything, or at least it should be if you want to bring the eyes back again and again.
The Comrades Marathon run over a different route would not be the Comrades any more, Wimbledon wouldn’t be Wimbledon if the tournament was taken away from the grass courts.
We sometimes need to throw ourselves forward to what people might be saying when they look back from the vantage point of the future to properly understand how important context is. If the Boks go to the UK and lose the series 4-0, are we going to look back years from now and compare that with McBride’s team’s achievement in 1974 or the squad coached by Ian McGeechan 23 years later?
The Lions winning a home series just isn’t the same thing. What the Lions will be out to do will surely undermine the whole Lions concept.
You just have to listen to what television rugby commentators in parts of the world vastly removed from each other are saying to get an inkling of how rugby people understand the core essence of a Lions tour.
During a Super Rugby Aotearoa match in New Zealand on Friday, when the absence of Warren Gatland from the Chiefs’ coaching box was spotlighted, the commentator said the Lions coach was busy selecting a squad “to go to Africa”. Later that same weekend, when the Lions coach was spotted at the Six Nations game between England and France at Twickenham, it was said he was running his eyes over the players he would take to SA.
The word “to” is the operative one in both sentences. Not selecting a team to play against the Springboks, but to take “to” SA.
And a week earlier, when the commentators started talking about a player who is not in any of the Six Nations squads during an English Premiership game, they spoke about how he was the ideal player “for the hard grounds of the highveld”. Which is another good point about previous Lions tours and previous Lions squads — they’ve been selected around a particular mission and to suit a particular goal, and that is why so often players who don’t get much international exposure in northern conditions crack the nod.
Jake White is right when he said it is probably better to have a Lions tour in the UK than to have no Lions tour, but there’s a lot of support from the rugby public, who should matter more than they clearly do to rugby administrators, for the tour rather to be postponed until a time when it is possible for a proper tour to take place.
We understand the difficulties getting various nations to change their schedules to accommodate a postponed Lions tour, but if rugby people can’t come together to sort that one out then it’s hardly surprising that they are also losing the battle to keep the sport entertaining.
Unless the Boks went there and won it, which would be a mighty achievement given that they would be facing an opponent drawn from the best players of four nations on their own turf, a Lions series taking place on UK soil would be an exercise made historically irrelevant by the asterisk that would forever rest alongside the result.
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