Yahoo News Six Nations 2017 will have added spice with Lions tour on the horizon - shine and the All Blacks await
The 2017 Six Nationswill have a decisive bearing on selection for the Lions tour to New Zealand and is sure to lead to some contentious calls. It has ever been thus. No Jeff Probyn in 1993. No England captain, Phil de Glanville, in 1997. Or Chris Robshaw in 2013. And it will always be so.
No matter that the old home unions bartering shop has been disbanded, the supposedly unbiased selectors from each of the four countries objectively running the rule over all the contenders only to mutate into rabid, over-my-dead-body one-eyed advocates of their own men when it came to the final selection meeting.
No matter that Warren Gatland is now the stand-alone main man on a year’s sabbatical from his Wales post, able to adopt an independent stance as he tours round all four training camps. There are players Gatland knows well and those insights will matter.
But, equally and tellingly, form will shape and even dictate the eventual choices made. Play well, my boy, and all this can be yours – this is the unspoken message from Lions head coach to potential tourist. “You have some ideas in your mind, of course you do, but you have to respond to what you see out on the pitch,” says the master of the Lions brief, Sir Ian McGeechan. “You have to pick on form, not on reputation.”
That was one of the reasons for the undoing of the 2005 British and Irish Lions tour party to New Zealand. Clive Woodward took an enlarged squad, 45 players, and included several of those who had done wonders in an England shirt, albeit 18 months earlier at the Rugby World Cup. By 2005, those juices were beginning to run dry.
Lions on the plane to New Zealand (latest)
Gatland admits to having about 70-80 players in mind as the championship begins. He will have to whittle that down to 35-37 by mid-April. At least he has given himself and his coaches, Steve Borthwick (England), Rob Howley (Wales) and Andy Farrell (Ireland), plenty of time to assess what they have seen throughout the championship, to argue and refine, until they name the chosen men.
In 1993 the final Lions’ selection meeting took place the day after the final game which, as it is this year, was an Ireland-England encounter in Dublin. Back-to-back Grand Slam champions England were expected to provide the bulk of the 30-man Lions party and even though they had let slip their triple Grand Slam ambitions with a 10-9 defeat by Wales in Cardiff, they had designs on rounding off in style at Lansdowne Road. Instead they were bushwhacked 17-3 by a fired-up Ireland. The manner of the loss was excuse enough to turn the next day’s Lions gathering at Heathrow into a feisty bunfight between coaches and selectors.
“It was a mess,” recalls Dick Best, England coach and Lions assistant coach alongside McGeechan for that 1993 trip to New Zealand. “I’d been up all night in a Dublin hospital after one of my close friends, RFU and London manager, Graham Smith, had a heart attack, flew in at the crack of dawn and staggered out at dusk, after a long bout of in-fighting without some of the players that we, the coaches, wanted for the Lions.”
Chief among them was Wasps tighthead prop Jeff Probyn. Although 36, Probyn was the cornerstone of the scrum. Two Scottish tightheads, Paul Burnell and Peter Wright, got the call. After the first Test, which the All Blacks won 20-18, the Lions were forced to press-gang a loosehead prop, Jason Leonard, into service on the unfamiliar tighthead side.
“Jason had to ring me for a few pointers,” said Probyn. “The politics were always there in those days. It’s not the fault of the players. They are just doing their best to get on the tour.”
There are invariably high-profile casualties. It is not just a question of individual talent but of what best suits the composition of that particular Lions party. Wales fly-half Jonathan Davies returned to union in 1995 after seven seasons in rugby league. Davies, one of the most gifted dual code players in the history of the two sports, had a shot at making the 1997 Lions tour to South Africa. He was even recalled to the starting spot for the final game of that year’s Six Nations, against England at the Arms Park. Instead it was another oldie, England centre Jeremy Guscott, who stole the show from the replacements’ bench as England ran out 34-13 winners. Guscott made the trip, Davies did not.
“I wasn’t the player I had been when I came back and to even be considered for Wales was a bonus,” said Davies. “Players in this championship have just got to enjoy the platform they have on which to perform. And they have to perform for their team, not for themselves as potential Lions – or they won’t be Lions. Mental toughness, the ability to deal with all sorts of pressures, including shutting out thoughts of the Lions, will be key in this championship.”
That is a message that has been drummed into all the players by their respective coaches. Do not mention the unmentionable, “that five-letter word” (Lions), as Wales acting head coach Howley referred to it. Eddie Jones put it well when stating that the Lions is “a massive attraction that must not become a massive distraction”. Even his Japanese wife, Hiroko, well-versed in her husband’s obsessive rugby ways, was moved to question him as to what all this Lions frenzy in the media was about eight months before it even happened.
Such, then, are the stakes. The Six Nations, of course, has its unique dynamic, its own narrative, its particular twists and turns. If it is to be remembered it will be for fierce contests, raw tribal clashes, acts of stupendous artistry, or daring, or physicality. The Lions adds a veneer to it; it does not become the intrinsic value of the tournament itself. Gatland will have a different perspective on events to the rest of the watching millions. He is looking at individuals. We are absorbed in the entity itself, of the day and, by extension, of the whole. Have France really been revitalised and is Le Crunch back at the top of the bill? Is Vern Cotter about to leave Scotland, or been forced to leave Scotland, at the very moment that he has licked them into shape? Are Wales as poor as some critics made them out to be in the autumn? (The answer is surely no). The Conor O’Shea charm and intelligence is at work with Italy. Can that translate into results?
McGeechan went against the grain in 1997, not just by picking three uncapped players in Will Greenwood, Jim Mallinder and Martin Corry, but also in opting for Martin Johnson as captain before he had established himself with England. Jerry Guscott was something of a wild-card pick in 1989, again before he was capped, and again eight years later when England’s centre combo was Will Carling and Phil de Glanville.
There will be those sorts of surprises to come. Watch out, then, for the tour bolters, be it fly-half Joey Carbery or centre Garry Ringrose, both from Ireland, or Scotland prop Zander Fagerson, or England’s Kyle Sinckler or Welshman Keelan Giles. Take your pick.
On and on goes the chat, the intrigue, the level of interest. The 2017 RBS Six Nations Championship promises plenty for everyone.
