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A small drip of name-dropping to start our analysis of the British and Irish Lions performances so far on their 2013 tour of Australia, and how they played so well against a depleted but fired-up NSW Waratahs side in front of 40,805 spectators at the Sydney Football Stadium.
The media arrangements at the SFS have the working journalists with deadlines that night, and virtually by definition the big heavy-hitters, sitting behind the glass panels in the press box.
Those outside are the columnists and the bits and pieces of the media world, radio people, bloggers, mates and hangers-on. They get the best seat in the stadium at the SFS. They get seated at the back on the level one stand around the half-way mark and were treated to very comfortable red seats.
As I settled in to watch the thrilling opening moments, with the Lions almost scoring from the kick-off, I noticed behind me a stylish, neat Sir Clive Woodward, who is covering the tour for The Daily Mail, involuntarily clapping at a particular piece of Lions magic.
For most of the first half, the Lions were brilliant. They were winning the collisions. Their set pieces, lineouts and scrums, were powerful, they were creating turnovers and they were moving the ball elegantly and sometimes brilliantly (including a terrific pass-on by Paul O’Connell).
The atmosphere was terrific, with the Lions spectators calling out their resonant chant: ‘Li -ons! Li – ons! Li-ons.’
This chant was match by similar cries from the vast crowd: ‘Blu-es! Blu-es! Blu-es.’
These chants for the Waratahs reached a crescendo when the home side took a quick lineout, the NSW five-eighths Bernard Foley (a splendid player throughout the match) put in a cross kick from inside his own 22. Winger Peter Betham, another handful for the Lions, raced through and gathered the ball, beat off the attempted tackle of Sean Maitland, raced away like a kid bolting out of the school gate and then passed to Tom Carter, for the cart horse to gallop through for a wonderful try.
This made the score 10 – 7, and it looked like game on.
The Lions forced a penalty to take the score to 13 – 7 through the dead-eyed kicking of Leigh Halfpenny.
At this point in the match, the Waratahs started to get too carried away with enthusiasm to take the game to the Lions. They turned down a shot at goal. And they made it too obvious that their main tactics involved, aside from their ball-in-hand game, taking the Lions halves out of the game by tackling them late and often later.
The referee, the South African Jaco Peyper, after suggestions from Sam Warburton, rightly took exception to this taking-out tactic. The penalty count began to mount against the Waratahs.
Peyper and the assistant referees Jerome Garces (a Frenchman) and Glen Jackson (a New Zealander) turned a blind eye to the constant offside play of the Lions defensive line.
The Lions offside tactics were shrewd. The side that play was moving to stayed behind the offside line. But on the other side of the field, the defensive line moved ahead of the line. The effect of this was to make it difficult for the Waratahs to keep their running plays going around the corner.
I wrote down in my notebook: “Lions offside all the time!”
Hopefully the referee for the first Test, New Zealander Chris Pollock and assistant referees South African Craig Joubert and Frenchman Roman Poite will keep an eye on the Lions’ penchant for offside play.
Right on half-time, just after they had snuffed out a storming attack set up by the impressive Cam Crawford, the Lions scored a brilliant try when playmaker Johnny Sexton chipped through, with the attack continued by the splendid Jonathan Davies and through to Halfpenny who scored the try and made the conversion.
The scoreline was 23 – 10 and a reflection of the outstanding play by the Lions, and the courageous response from the Waratahs.
I waited for Clive Woodward to text a message and, having got to know him a bit on the 2005 Lions tour to New Zealand when he was coach, went across to shake his hand and have a short chat. He told me he’d read my column that day in the SMH.
I wondered if this was code for alerting me that he’d read my column the week earlier when I’d taken him to task for suggesting that the Lions might have to re-consider Lions tour to Australia if second-rate teams were offered up as opposition in all the non-Test games.
Who knows. Anyway, I said to him that the Lions had played their best rugby on the tour and their play was a notch above anything they had offered against the Queensland Reds.
“I have just texted that same thought,” Woodward told me.
He also said that Gatland will be relieved at the lift in intensity and performance in their play. The implication in all of this is that the Lions will be far harder challenge for the Wallabies than most of us (and I include myself in this collective) believed after their first three matches in Australia.
I asked Woodward, a champion stirrer in his days as a great coach of England in particular, what he thought about Bob Dwyer’s comments that the Lions were serial “cheaters.”
He said that Gatland was smart in not getting into a slanging match with Dwyer. Gatland, in fact, was not giving the accusations any oxygen and this diminished any impact they were intended to have had.
The Dwyer accusations (which he makes against every team that plays the Wallabies!) were published by the unrelenting Wayne Smith in The Australian.
According to Dwyer, the Lions cheat by packing in on an angle: they scrum up illegally: put barriers in front of their catchers illegally: their decoy runners take out defenders illegally: and they go past the ball in rucks and then go to ground to seal off illegally.
Smith makes this final accusation in this list of Lions cheating tactics: “And don’t get Dwyer started on the Lions’ offisde play. Let’s just say he has grave doubts that any of them are aware of the concept of being offside at the tackle contest.”
What do we make of all of this? Is there something to the Dwyer complaints, or is this traditional Dwyer hot air, as Woodward and Gatland would claim.
In justification of his ‘cheaters’ allegations, Dwyer makes this point: “One comment I’d like to make having seen the Lions in action on tour is that it doesn’t come as any surprise they’re coached by a New Zealander because they they play outside the laws of the game as every New Zealand side does.”
Even Smith was startled by this argument which he called “leading with his chin given who currently coaches the Wallabies.”
Does Dwyer also make the case that the Wallabies are cheaters, too?
Going to specifics, though, I’d agree (as is obvious from my early comments) that the Lions play offside all over the field.
It was surprise, too, that Peyper was so generous to them on this from, and also on their general play at the ruck. In Super Rugby matches, Peyper has been intolerant towards Australian and New Zealand sides who don’t support their weight at the breakdown, or go past the ball and obstruct the side trying to recycle the ball.
So two of Dwyers complaints are valid, in my view.
But I couldn’t see much evidence of the other complaints.
So to wrap up. The Waratahs played the man, especially the Lions halves, in an illegal manner. The Lions played offside and illegally in the rucks.
The referee correctly pounced on the Waratahs for their illegalities and was, shall we say, not so harsh on the Lions for what some of us believed were transgressions.
Managing the referee is one of the fine arts of rugby captaincy. At the time of Sam Warburton’s selection as the Lions captain it was suggested that one of his better skills as a player was the emollient relationship he seems to forge with referees. This suggests a certain skill in gamesmanship, rather than a cheating mode.
Mark the fine performance by the Lions against the Waratahs then down to superior selection and coaching by Gatland rather than any sort of victory for cheating.
But hopefully next Saturday against the Wallabies the Lions will be forced to play their brilliant attacking and defending rugby from behind the offside line.
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