Ollie Campbell and the Fruit Machine

Bill McBride and Jim Telfer have laid down a number of conditions that they say will be applied to the choice of captain of the British Lions team, which they will manage and coach in New Zealand in two months' time.

They say the captain must be sure of his place in the test team; that he must be capable of fulfilling his many social obligations; that he must have the respect of his fellow players; and that his disciplinary record must be exemplary. Well, there is only one senior player in Britain and Ireland who meets all those requirements, and that is Peter Wheeler, the England
hooker.

That being the case, how on earth do you explain the groundswell of opinion now being voiced by the massed battalions of crumb-catchers and hint-pickeruppers that aver that Ciaran Fitzgerald of Ireland will be the tour captain?

It seems to me that there is only one place that that groundswell of opinion can originate and that is Ballymena. And yet one of the most distinguished men in Irish Rugby, a man who is uniquely qualified to pronounce on this particular subject, is in no doubt that as a player Fitzgerald does not rank among the first two hookers in the home championship and therefore, by inference, is not worth a place in the touring team, never mind the test team, and never mind the captaincy.

If Wheeler is selected for the tour (and the purebred cynic in me is beginning to wonder whether he will be), I have no doubt that he will see off the hooking opposition with no trouble at all. You cannot buy his sort of experience, and in addition to that, he is the only genuine hooker in the championship. If you took the handflap signal for putting the ball into the serum away from the other three hookers, they would not be able to get off the starting blocks.
 
That handflap signal and many shortsighted changes in the laws of the game have devalued front row play, and in particular hooking, to the point where they are becoming lost arts. Allowing the handflap signal is exactly the same as allowing one of the sprinters competing in a race to fire the starting gun. Peter Wheeler could manage quite easily without it. Ciaran Fitzgerald, Billy James and Colin Deans could not. Indeed, every time I write about hooking and hookers these days, I take my hat off in mourning and mentally apologise to the likes of Ernie Robinson and Bryn Meredith and John Pullin and Ronnie Dawson. I also apologise to the scrumhalves who have to try to get the ball past so many uneducated feet.

But there it is. I have an uncomfortable feeling that we shall see a repeat of the John Pullin travesty of justice in 1974 when he was not even chosen for the Lions tour of South Africa, even though, as subsequent events proved, he was far and away the best choice available. The Four Home Unions make nothing like as much use of the experience available to them as they should, partly because two of the Unions, Ireland and Scotland, have no choice but to go on capping players into near senility, and because' the other two Unions, England and Wales, have such a surfeit of choice that their selectors are rarely capable of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

This will not be an easy British Lions team to choose. The All Blacks recently left Wales in no doubt about the comparative ability of the two teams and the success of the French tight forwards and the French backs in the international championship this season has revealed even more uncomfortable truths. British and Irish tight forward play is in a pretty poor state of repair and some frightening gaps exist down the left side of the potential Lions' test team, never mind the Wednesday afternoon team. The situation has been made even more difficult for the Lions' selectors by injuries, non-availabilities, and the aberrations of the national selectors.

Before the start of this season, the likely Lions test team would have been: Andy Irvine, John Carleton, Paul Dodge, Clive Woodward, Mike Slemen, Ollie Campbell, Terry Holmes; Clive Williams, Peter Wheeler, Graham Price, Maurice Colclough, Donal Lenihan, John O'Driscoll, Peter Winterbottom and John Scott. If Slemen had been an Irishman, I have little doubt that he would have gone on winning caps until he was forty, but now he has gone, and so have Irvine, Woodward, Williams, Price and Colclough. After England's game against France, Scott was also on the knife edge, and after England's game against Wales, so was Carleton.

With just a fortnight of the international season remaining, the Lions' test team might well be: Hugo MacNeill, A.N. Other, Paul Dodge, Dave Irwin, Michael Kiernan; Ollie Campbell, Terry Holmes; A.N. Other, Peter Wheeler, A.N. Other, A.N. Other, Donal Lenihan, John O'Driscoll, Peter Winterbottom and A.N. Other. Normally, at this stage of a Lions' tour season, only the reserve team contains five A.N. Others. The test team is usually settled, but to keep that number down to five, I have had to include Peter Wheeler who, as I say, should certainly be there, but who may well end up getting the elbow.

I would still stick by Graham Price as first choice at tight head without hesitation, and I think that Colin Smart may well turn out to be the most successful loose head, but if the new Welsh props, Ian Eidman and Staff Jones, can cope with the French front row on March 19, they could well be catapulted into the touring team.

On the face of things, Jones and Eidman had an auspicious debut for Wales against Scotland a fortnight ago, but it is as well to remember that most of Scotland's dismal problems this season have stemmed from the fact that they do not seem to have any tight forwards at all.

Even Ireland's game against Wales this week will not tell us much, because the Irish front row had a most uncomfortable and technically inept game against the French forwards at Lansdowne Road last month, as indeed, did the rest of the Irish tight five. Ireland made nothing of the fact that France had to shovel the ball straight into the scrums because Herrero could not be relied upon to hook anything in a goldfish bowl, and when Ireland were putting in the ball, they were in all sorts of bother.

This confirmed me in my view that the Lions ought to have as one of their first priorities a determination to get Maurice Colclough out of crutches and on to the aircraft, and a similar determination to select Jim Syddall, the England lock who has had to miss the current international season because he was sent off the field in a club match. Colclough and Syddall are exactly the sort of uncompromising tight forwards you must have to tour New Zealand. I would bet that they would establish themselves as the test pairing, but be that as it may, you go naked into the conference chamber of New Zealand Rugby if you do not take some nuclear deterrents like Colclough and Syddall. Nobody, but nobody, would knock them about.

Still, the poverty of the situation facing the Lions' selectors is not altogether surprising, because as far as the quality of individual play is concerned, this has been one of the least distinguished international seasons we have seen for twenty years. Terry Holmes, the Welsh scrum-half, stands alone as a colossus in the Four Home Unions, and the next man in sight, about two miles back across the sea to Greece, is Ollie Campbell.

Sadly, the laws of Rugby Union football being the asses they are, the more important of the two in terms of winning matches is Ollie Campbell. Thus it is that Dad's Army, as Ireland's venerable pack is affectionately known, are well aware that all they have to do is hang around in the opposition's half of the field for as long as they can, and on the laws of averages, that fruit machine called Ollie Campbell will hit them the jackpot.

Campbell failed lamentably against France. He only scored 14 points! It is true that in so doing, he beat Tom Kiernan's points record for Ireland, patiently and painfully acquired over what was then a record number of 54 appearances for his country. Campbell sailed past Kiernan's total in 17 games and 13 minutes.

But Campbell could have scored 30 points in that game, and I was sorry that he did not, because only a piece of mockery as outrageous as that will persuade the International Rugby Football Board to give the ludicrous balance in favour of goal kickers a good hearty boot in the other direction. Remember that the International Board did absolutely nothing until Carwyn James mischievously took the mickey out of them and it on the Lions' tour of New Zealand in 1971. What is more, he did it in New Zealand, and heresy does not come more heretical than that.

If Ollie Campbell and Dad's Army bring off the Grand Slam for Ireland this year, good luck to them, but I confess I find no diversion or uplift in the sight of a team concentrating on negation and standing around offside all afternoon while they wait for a fruit machine to start pumping out the silver coins.