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Warren Gatland put it well when he said the give-them-hell tactics of the Reds against the British and Irish Lions on Saturday night reminded him of those old-fashioned long tours where every province came out to ‘throw everything at the visitors for the first 20 or 30 minutes’.
And judging by the constant roar from the 50,126-strong crowd at the ground, all of them (with the exception of the several thousand Lions supporters) were determined to be what the French call ‘the 16th player’ for the Reds by trying to convert the referee to be more favourable to the home boys.
One of the dramas of touring is that you just don’t know what team, aside from the national side which will be strong, will be the one to knock you off.
The Springboks used to take a mounted springbok head on their long tours to be presented to the first provincial side that defeated them.
New Zealand ancients can still remember the explosion of rugby chauvinism that greeted Waikato’s boots’n all victory over the 1956 Springboks, in their first match of their New Zealand tour after the side had carved through their opposition in Australia.
I was at the 1959 Lions first match of their New Zealand tour at Hawkes Bay, sitting behind the goal-posts. The Bay started off, much like Waikato, with a hiss and roar and stormed through to a try under the posts.
There was a perceptible flow of chatter around the ground as the team’s came back to the halfway mark for the kickoff: The Bay was going to do a Waikato on the Lions!
From the kick-off, Hawkes Bay were penalised just outside the Lions’ 22. The visitors took a tap kick. The ball was moved through a number of pairs of hands until David Hewitt, the greyhound Irish centre, grabbed it and bolted away on a beautiful curving breakout run.
From behind the posts I could see how the arc of Hewitt’s run was taking him around a lumbering forward and inside a winger standing wide.
Moments later, with the defence spread-eagled, Hewitt was dotting the ball under the Hawkes Bay posts.
And that was the end of any pretensions to victory the Hawkes Bay players and their supporters might have had.
It was also for me the beginning of a love affair with Lions rugby: glorious, sometimes graceful, sometimes brutal, always enterprising and adventurous, rugby played with dash, inventiveness and spirit. Some of the greatest players I’ve ever seen played their greatest rugby in the Lions jersey.
It is this glorious ethic of playing the game in the spirit of Rugby School, picking up the ball ‘and running with it’, not kicking it, that makes the Lions tours such wonderful rugby occasions.
Most Roarers have concentrated on the magical and sometimes woeful play of Quade Cooper. But a lot of the magic on display came from Lions players, especially their wingers George North, who is a latter-day Tony O’Reilly with his size and pace, and Tommy Bowe, more elusive, less confrontational in his running, a sort of bigger version of the English genius Peter Jackson – a winger who, along with Hewitt, bedazzled the Hawkes Bay defenders in that 1959 match.
The joy of touring was experienced by Bowe on Saturday night with his glittering play in ripping apart the Reds defence.
But the pain of touring has also been felt by him as he has suffered an injury that puts him out of the tour. Glory and disaster, on the one night.
So Bowe is flying back home and North is playing tonight against the Combined Country at Hunter Stadium in Newcastle.
The Newcastle area, specifically the Hunter River near Maitland, was the scene of one of the saddest rugby touring stories ever recorded.
The team involved was the 1888 British touring side. The details and story of the tragedy are taken from Sean Fagan’s masterly account of the tour, The First Lions (published by Slattery Media Group).
The first Lions were about two-thirds through their 54-match tour, which included AFL matches in Victoria, South Australia and NSW, as well as rugby throughout NSW, Queensland and New Zealand.
The final AFL match of the tour had been played at Maitland. Instead of coming back to Newcastle to prepare for a rugby match a couple of days later, Bob Seddon, the inspiring captain of the side and its best forward, and several other players stayed back in Maitland to go boating on the Hunter River.
Seddon broke away from the boating group and went around a bend of the river, out of sight of the others. Some time later, after Seddon – who was an expert boating man – had not returned they went up the river in search of him.
They were astonished to find Seddon had drowned. He was seen by some witnesses trying to swim safely to the river bank.
“He swam about 15 yards on his back, and then sank twice, the last time for good,” a witness told a local reporter.
One of the promoters of the tour, the famous English cricketer Arthur Shrewsbury, has given us a poignant last memory of Seddon:
“We left him standing outside his hotel at Maitland with no hat upon his head and a cigarette in his mouth, in the very best of health and spirits. It was a most beautiful day, the sun shining out in full splendour and Bob stood looking the very impersonation of perfect happiness and contentment.”
Only hours later, a fellow player, Tom Haslam – the inventor of the dummy pass that confounded opponents on the tour – ran crying into the team’s hotel in Newcastle, “Bob Seddon is drowned.”
Vale Bob Seddon. It would be wonderful if a Lions team 125 years later remembered him and his teammates with perhaps a black armband or a minute’s silence before their match in Newcastle, a town that had a rugby match scheduled for the first Lions but was never played.
The joy, drama and pain of rugby touring in 1888 and still with us in 2013.