The Last Word

The omens for the 1983 tour of New Zealand by the British Isles and Ireland were not exactly propitious. The tours committee of the Four Home Unions had made yet another bodge of the match programme, despite the fact that it is such a simple exercise that it would not take anyone who knows anything about New Zealand and New Zealand Rugby more than an hour to get it all right, including travel and choice of hotels.

 

Bill McBride had been preferred to the far more practical Ray McLoughlin as manager and was nowhere near ready for the job.

 

Jim Telfer, the coach, turned out to be a Scottish idealist instead of the necessary realist, one of those hard-headed practical Scots who engineered their way round the world in the 19th century and who, incidentally, built the foundations of New Zealand Rugby.

 

Ciaran Fitzgerald, the player whom McBride and Telfer chose as captain, was so far out of his depth in every area of the game, including the captaincy, that, as Bill Beaumont remarked at the end of the tour, you could only feel sorry for the lad.

 

Then there was the team. Admittedly, it was chosen at the end of a season which, in terms of individual quality, was the worst I can recall in 30 years. This meant that the selectors could not afford to make a single mistake, either in concept or in individual choice, because you never have room to do either when you are in the business of making the best of a bad job.

 

So what happened? The team was chosen to fulfil a function of which it was not capable and in the process, it fell between every selection stool in sight. It was also full of players in key positions whose styles of play could not possibly have been reconciled in the task of building a team pattern to withstand the impact of inevitable injuries. Then there was the opposition.

 

This had demolished Wales and the Welsh clubs in 1980, and clearly, if it was anything like still as good, it would cruise home 4-0. The only shred of hope, for those of us who had seen the All Blacks scrape home by the greatest good fortune in extra time of the last match against the Springboks in 1981, was that this New Zealand team must be near the end of the road.

 

This impression was strengthened by the indignities the All Blacks have suffered recently at the hands and feet of the marvellously inventive Australian back division.

 

I considered the pros and cons very carefully and came to the firm conclusion that I should invest in the proposition that the Lions would lose the coming series four-nil. After all, the Lions had no one remotely resembling a Mark Ella or a David Campesi, and the odds were surprisingly generous. It turned out to be money for old rope.

 

The only sadness was that the other bet at 33-1 that the Lions would lose all four tests and win all their provincial matches went down in the second game against Auckland. I feel I ought to be able to sue somebody, because a Lions team should never now lose a provincial match and it certainly should not have done so on the tour of New Zealand which has just ended.

 

But whatever happens, let us not bleat too much about the tour itinerary. Obviously, if test matches are to be played on Saturdays, you would not expect to have to be an A. Einstein to work out that all your top provincial matches should also be played on Saturdays. That is how you develop a touring rhythm, and a proper pattern of selection, with a Wednesday and Saturday team firmly established from the time the touring party assembles in London. There is no other way, particularly on an 18-match tour. There is no time for pretension. So what happened? Mickey Steele-Bodger and his brains trust agreed to play Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury in midweek!

 

Even so, the Lions should have taken that in their stride. Remember 1974? New Zealand came over here and played Ireland, Wales and the British Lions in eight days. No bother. They beat the first two and were only diddled out of an outright victory against Bill McBride's Lions when the Lions, masquerading as the Barbarians, were allowed to score from a lineout throw which was so squint it reminded me of someone or other. So the game was drawn.

 

Certainly no All Black team ever has an itinerary in this country which contains six matches, and arguably seven, as easy as those played by the Lions in New Zealand in 1983. The Auckland defeat was due to the fact that the Lions played them too early in the tour. The defeat by Canterbury was no less than a wound self-inflicted by the Lions' selectors. A wound verging on suicide.

 

Steve Smith, the England scrumhalf, could not believe it. The day he arrived in New Zealand as an injury replacement, he went straight on to the substitutes bench for the Canterbury match.

 

"Ollie Campbell was sitting one side of me and 'Dusty' Hare the other, and Gwyn Evans was sitting behind me. Three of the best goal kickers in the world and not one on the field." It was the most extraordinary selection in a tour which specialised in such things. Inevitably, the match ended with poor Hugo MacNeill having to kick a goal to save his team from defeat. Equally inevitably, he missed it. His confidence was devastated. The treatment of Hare was a mystery. No one has pointed out his shortcomings as a catcher and tackler more faithfully than I have, but if Jim Telfer wanted a full-back to come into the line, then Hare was the best he had by a street and a half.

 

Hare has a knack of timing his run into the line to perfection. He is a fine footballer, too, and as a goal kicker, he is not far short even of Ollie Campbell. His display of kicking against the West Coast at Greymouth was one of the finest I have seen.

 

His reward was to be left out of the team for three weeks. He might just as well have come home — and yet had he played against Canterbury, the Lions would have won the game — easily. And Hare should have played. That game, coming four days before the third test, ought to have been the dirttrackers' test match, and treated as such. It would have been an invaluable boost for morale.

 

The All Blacks were so much better at selection. They always have been. They know exactly what they want done, and they pick players to do it. Jock Hobbs was a case in point. The All Blacks wanted a groveller. They wanted a flank who could compensate for all their big men by digging the ball up off the floor. Hobbs did that job.

 

You would never catch the All Blacks consistently flapping the ball back from a lineout, either. Yet the Lions did that for more than half the tour. Their view — apparently taken on the advice of senior players — was that a system of lineout sweeping was not practical. This put the scrum-halves in such peril that I felt obliged to ask if it really was a conscious act of disorganisation. One of the forwards involved in the decision shrugged. "You cannot sweep if you don't know where the ball is going", he said. "If you commit yourself to a support position and the ball goes somewhere else, you would be whistled off the park. " He had a point, of course, but even throwing-in as inept as that of Ciaran Fitzgerald ought not to have determined such unsound policy. That policy was reversed, of course. When the Lions were dormy two down. Of course.

 

The All Blacks were much better managed than the Lions, they were much better coached, and they were much better captained. As far as I could make out, the same chap did all three jobs. Name of Andy Dalton.

 

I know that a man called Bryce Rope was supposed to be coaching the All Blacks. But whenever I watched them train, the man in charge was Dalton. Rope just stood at the end of the field and let them get on with it. All he ever did was try to stop them when he thought they had been at it long enough. He failed at that, too.

 

As a coach, and as a captain, Dalton was a pragmatist. Most New Zealanders are. He and they are concerned with what works. Jim Telfer spent most of the tour concerning himself with what he felt ought to have worked.

 

Telfer oozes integrity. The players loved him for that. But it was daft to try to turn a team of maulers into a team of ruckers in three weeks. It was daft to try to play his centres as inside and outside rather than left and right. It was daft to muck about with the back row organisation. It was daft not to have the lineout tightly swept. It was daft to try to play 15-man Rugby with an Irish back division which had no experience of doing that.

 

These were idealistic concepts. On an 18-match tour, you don't have time for ideals. You only have time to concern yourself with what works. Dalton's half-time talk in the second test was a case in point. The All Blacks led only 9-0 after playing down such a strong wind that they all felt that 15 points was the minimum lead necessary for safety.

 

What Dalton then had to say was so succinct and so to the point that it lifted the All Blacks to their finest moments of the tour. It was the Agincourt speech all over again. While this was going on, Ciaran Fitzgerald was effectively saying nothing. He seemed to think that the wind would win the match. No definition of objectives. No nuts and bolts. Fitzgerald always found communication difficult. On the eve of the third test, there were still fourteen players in his team with whom he had not had a man to man talk. Fourteen virtual strangers.

 

But Fitzgerald was McBride's man, and therefore he had to be defended, whatever the cost. It was an overwhelming argument in favour of adopting the New Zealand pattern and eliminating the tour manager and the captain from the selection process.

 

The All Blacks made a similar mess of selection in South Africa in 1970 and so they dropped the idea of a tour committee. Ever since, their coach has been the sole selector. Much better.

 

McBride made hard work of the tour. He was not helped by the Four Home Unions' tours committee, who really do issue some horribly inappropriate instructions and advice, but I think the hardest things he had to endure on tour was the way JR's predictions hit the bulls eye. One after the other.

 

The fans with typewriters that McBride had in tow felt just as bad about them. Well, I would remind them all that I made a few predictions after the 1974 tour of South Africa. All those came right, too. "If we play like this," I said, "we can kiss goodbye to British and Irish back play".

 

The Lions back play in 1983 was an embarrassment. Yet there was a time in mid-tour when the Lions' management clearly thought that their backs were better than the All Blacks.

It would have made far more sense for the Lions to play 10-man Rugby, as I thought they were going to. Instead, I suspect that Ireland playing as an individual country would have done better than the Lions. At least they have always known what they cannot do. England and Wales together would have been far stronger than the Lions.

 

Sadly, New Zealand no longer look to the British Isles for inspiration in their back play. They look to Australia and to the lightening passing of Mark Ella and his midfield. I don't blame them.

The era of Lions forward domination has also ended. No more three-man scrums for the All Blacks. They are back in business as equals.

 

This is also a pity, because it ought not to have happened. It was not a particularly good All Black team. It was full of old men, ready to be rolled, and I am convinced that the presence of Peter Wheeler alone would have made the difference between the Lions winning and losing the first test.

 

Had the Lions won, the All Blacks would have made changes. All that was needed was Wheelers throwing in, and Wheelers hooking, and Wheelers strength. Colin Deans admitted that he would not have minded playing second fiddle to him.

 

Mind you, that potential forward domination was lost with the injuries of Ian Stephens, Bob Norster and Jeff Squire, and the physical domination behind them was lost with the injury of Terry Holmes. Staff Jones, Steve Bainbridge, and the other loose forwards were not in the same class.

 

A lot was made of Bainbridge's alleged improvement. Have a look at a video of the last test. Look at Graham Pierce, turning inside, and dropping the scrum. Which, incidentally, the Australian referee ignored. Pricey did that because he is too proud to go backwards. He did the same thing when he had Richard Moriarty behind him in the Welsh pack. A non-scrummager.

 

You must have your best scrummager behind the tight head. Look at the video clip of the All Blacks wheeling the Lions for Hobbs try. Same problem. As I have said, the England pack's version of Dutch elm disease.

 

It would not have happened if John Perkins or Jim Syndall had been there. So back we come to selection. Over and over again. Selection of players, selection of managements, selection of selectors, selection even of members of the Four Home Unions tours committee. That is where the buck stops. That is the source of all our problems. That is why the Lions lost so ignominiously in New Zealand in 1983.

Tags: