THE Lions is a rugby concept I first got some semblance of at the age of 10 thanks to some highlights screened on RTE when the British and Irish combination got the better of Australia in 1989.
The team skippered by Scotland’s Finlay Calder became the first Lions side to win a test series having lost the first test against a Wallabies unit which lifted the World Cup two years later.
"It was a marvellous tour under the best Lions' captain, Finlay Calder," according to Scott Hastings, whose brother Gavin captained the Lions in New Zealand four years later.
"Wearing that red jersey is very special but being part of a squad that has won a Test series is even more precious.”
Fellow Scot Ian McGeechan coached the Lions to victory in Australia and would lead them to an even headier series success in South Africa in 1997, a high-water mark which may never again be equalled given how different the union game now is.
And there’s unlikely to ever again be as popular a Lions coach, taking the sensibilities of all four nations into account, as ‘Geech’, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing in October 2009 while he was promoting his autobiography, ‘Lion Man’.
“The idea for the book came out of conversations about the way the game was moving and how it’s developed in recent years,” he told me during a phone conversation in which I found it difficult to quell my giddiness. Me, talking to Ian McGeechan!
“We’re firmly set in the professional age now, but there’s still a lot of talk about the amateur era and out of various conversations I thought it might be a good time to try and put thoughts down on paper and just try and go through some of the things that have influenced me in my life and my rugby.”
I read ‘Lion Man’ (co-written by Stephen Jones, an invisible presence in terms of the book’s tone, as every reputable ghost writer ought to be) in five days, a speedy read by my standards. It was initially meant to be 80,000 words but eventually weighed in at 123,000 but it doesn’t feel over-written or padded out.
And in a career full of strong, compelling team mates, players and coaching colleagues, McGeechan doesn’t skim over the strength of his marriage to Judy, whom by book’s end is clearly established as Geech’s greatest partner and influence.
“There were points in my career when some things just couldn’t have happened had it not been for Judy, especially during the amateur days when you weren’t getting paid,” he said. “The fact that you’ve got someone who was willing to go out to work in the evenings, it’s difficult to put a value on what Judy has done for me. She’s much brighter than I am and she could have had a very successful career in her own right.”
Ian added: “She ended up going out serving meals to students at the local halls of residence to get enough money so we could keep paying the mortgage. I owe a huge debt to her and what she has done.”
Since this original interview – at the time I was playing rugby at seconds level and rarely to any game changing effect, alas – rugby union has, for me, changed as much in 11 years as it did between 1995 (when the game went professional) and 2009.
Since then, the Lions tour itself has been compacted into a far less fun and more streamlined format, which has greatly stymied the prospect of replicating the spirit of the ’97 tour, which Ian McGeechan and Jim Telfer spearheaded.
When asked to compare and contrast rugby in 2009 to the mid-1970s, when these islands produced a Lions team – including McGeechan, which went to South Africa and won 21 games out of 22 – the man himself felt rugby was “much better” in ’09.
“The ball is in play more it’s much more exciting and I think a lot more goes on in the 80 minutes now than when I played. But it’s just different now and I think you just have to accept that it’s evolved. And in the 14 years since it went professional, things around it – management structures, club structures and the things necessary to produce a successful game which has to merge amateur and professional – have changed, no question.”
He continued: “You’re not born a professional. You’re born an amateur. And I think you develop the right ethos trough people who are there just because the love the game. And if you are good enough, you become a professional but I don’t think you can ever forget those roots that allow you to become that sort of player.”
Ian McGeechan is inextricably linked to the Lions in a distinctive manner given just how successful he was wearing both hats. There’ll be a charge by some rugby writers to label Warren Gatland as the greatest ever Lions coach should he prove victorious in South Africa next summer. On a per game basis, he may well be in the frame to claim such a mantle but taking the wider angle of the Lions into account, no-one holds a candle to Ian McGeechan.
“For me, keeping the Lions alive is very important. To the players, it’s still the biggest jersey they can ever wear and the Lions test matches are just a different environment that you cannot experience in any other way…what the Lions generates, what surrounds it, well you just don’t have that with any other team.”
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