Even when things didn’t go well on the field, it was always such a pleasure to mix and train with the best players from the UK and Ireland.
In 2005, we played 11 games in New Zealand having had a warmup game against Argentina in Cardiff. By 2009, when we went to South Africa, the tour dropped to 10 games without a warm-up match and in Australia in 2013 it was nine games with a run out against the Barbarians in Hong Kong.
The last Lions trip to New Zealand, in 2017, went up to 10 games, while there were only eight games on the Covid-hit tour to South Africa in 2021, with a warm-up game against Japan in Edinburgh. It has almost become a case of blink, and you’ll miss the Lions! I just wonder what it must have been like on the 1966 tour when they left in May, returned home in September and played 35 games in Australia, New Zealand and Canada? And that was in the amateur days when the players weren’t getting paid!
I’m not sure I would have been able to put up with some of my team-mates for that length of time, but the players on the modern-day tours are more akin to hired guns than tourists in the grand style of their predecessors.
There is little doubt the Lions are a cash cow for the southern hemisphere nations, just as the Autumn visits by the All Blacks, Wallabies and Springboks are in a reciprocal manner in the northern hemisphere.
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