Loose Pass: Reasons to fret over ‘Leinsterfication’ of the British and Irish Lions and why the Big Day Out left a sour taste
12 Leinster players made the British and Irish Lions squad.
This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with the second teams being fielded and the debate about the Lions squad…
Second-string run-in does the game no favours
Bath’s visit to the Principality Stadium at the weekend was a well-organised, well-thought-out concept. There were more fans there than there were for the Welsh derby day in the United Rugby Championship a few weeks prior.
Fourth against first in the Premiership, local bragging rights at stake, a scattering of newly-minted Lions on show, one of Europe’s grandest stadia.
Except, of course, the odds on the result going Bristol‘s way were significantly shortened on Friday at the Bath team announcement, when Johann van Graan picked what even TNT Sports’ commentary team termed a ‘second team’ for the game. It ended up being a fun spectacle, even more so as Bristol twice reduced themselves to 13 men in attempting to make a game of it, yet it also had a funny old feel to it once we knew how Bath viewed its outcome.
You can’t really blame Bath’s coaching staff. There are bigger fish to fry in the coming weeks, more likely than not there will be two major finals one after the other at the end of May. Even in a season with no play-offs, Bath may have rotated the squad anyway, such is their lead at the top of the table. Fair play to them.
But while there continues to be so much gush and fawning over the Premiership’s current spectacular nature, it’s also amiss that so many make the effort to travel down the M4 or railway line to Cardiff to watch what amounts to little more than defensive practice for Bath’s reserves. Exeter’s fourth win of the season came against as callow a Northampton Saints team as you could imagine on Sunday; that’s 40 per cent of the weekend’s fixtures starting out as games where one of the coaches perceives a late-season fixture as a possible defeat, and is ok with that.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s asking a little much for the fans to appreciate the importance of rotation for some games, just as it would be asking a little much of the players – especially the international players – to play every single game of the season.
But with all our media benefactors – and there are too many of those as well – demanding their pounds of flesh, we’ll continue to be faced with a calendar which forces coaches and teams to pick and choose which weekends to optimise on, an art which few newcomers to the game will particularly sympathise with, not least when they’ve parted with a chunk of disposable income to ensure train fares, match tickets, food on the fly and such, only for their only glimpse of Finn Russell to be a handsome grin up on the stadium screen.
It really needs a sort out. May should be a month where every game counts, not just the ones that the coaches choose to count.
Leinster dozen could work either way
It’s not entirely unknown for one international team to be built around the backbone of a club/provincial side. Think France and Toulouse in the noughties, the Ospreys and Wales back then as well.
But for the Lions? That’s a new one. 12 Leinstermen, 32 per cent of the squad, form the backbone of Andy Farrell’s British and Irish Lions squad. That’s a faintly ridiculous proportion; it could have been more too, were it not for the dreadful misfortune to befall Caelan Doris. Unlucky 13?
Anyway, while there’s little doubting Leinster‘s quality – leaving aside the uncomfortable truth that they’ve not won anything for four years – there are other reasons to fret about this. It’ll be a difficult task for the Lions management to avoid a ‘Leinsterfication’ of the squad culture for one, while the same could apply to a lesser extent to the playing style.
Caelan Doris’ worst Lions tour fears are confirmed as Leinster issue post-operation update
Brian Moore was once quite lucid during a Six Nations game, back in the days when Wales were formed almost exclusively from the Ospreys, about how club teams that are extremely successful will not be able to replicate the same success when they, along with one or two talented others from other teams, pull on the national jersey. The nuances that count at sub-international level simply cannot count at international level, because the quality of the opposition is simply too good.
You can argue that someone of Farrell’s calibre will not allow this to happen. We’ll see. But one or two of the selections – Jack Conan over Taulupe Faletau is a glaring one but there are a couple of others at lock and hooker – do make you wonder if being of blue blood became a tie-breaker during the selection process.
The 1977 Lions tour is often remembered for having taken an undue number of Welshmen (despite their superiority at the time, the golden generation was both longer in the tooth and short of four of the generational greats who couldn’t afford to make it), being managed/coached by a Welshman. The fault lines became more and more exposed by a ruthless Kiwi public and a cynical press corps who justifiably wondered about the imbalance of nationalities.
And 2025? The largest portion of tourists from one nation since 1977, led by the coach of that particular national team. One of the most important factors for success in Australia will be heeding lessons learned.
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