Springboks (Getty Images)
The team entertaining the prestigious British and Irish Lions every four years – whether it is the specific turn of South Africa, New Zealand or Australia – always commands at least one significant, reasonably obvious edge: familiarity.
Register your interest for the British & Irish Lions tickets in South Africa 2021
Unless the host country has experienced a rare degree of instability through poor lead-up form or a pronounced plague of injuries, the Test series against the Lions, especially at the outset, should see the southern-hemisphere powerhouse in question boasting settled combinations in most positions.
Drawn from the premier players of all of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, the Lions generally need a bit of time, by contrast, to “find each other” as a first-team unit.
This was a lot more possible in the old days, of course, when a Lions tour was much longer and the coaching staff had a better opportunity to get their Test selection ducks in a row in the generous lead-up weeks.
Cast your minds back, just for example, to the iconic 1974 tour of our shores under the captaincy of Willie John McBride, when one of the greatest Lions teams in history thumped the Boks 3-0 with one controversial draw in the final Test at Ellis Park and were unbeaten throughout the safari.
They had as many as seven tour matches – admittedly a few genuinely of the “dirt-tracker” variety – ahead of the first Test to prepare the nucleus of their elite players for the internationals, and then many more on a roster made up of 22 matches in total.
Lions tour have progressively (and sadly, in many respects) slimmed down in professional times: the 2021 Lions in South Africa will play five “provincial” games ahead of the first Test, and then none further between the next two on a total itinerary of eight games here.
That should make it even harder for the Lions to make their first-team line-up genuinely cohesive in time for the Test phase … especially as there is no single, obviously superior team at present from any of the four “Home Nations”. The latest edition of the annual Six Nations was very tight ahead of its coronavirus-related stoppage earlier this year.
SIGN UP | Click to receive Rob Houwing’s weekly ‘Rucking with Rob’ newsletter!
Advantage the World Cup-holding Springboks, then?
Possibly, but there is also this to consider: just how much Test rugby of their own are the Boks going to get in ahead of the tour, if the listed dates (from early July next year) stay unaltered?
The entire international Test roster, for the rest of this year and probably impacting on next, has been thrown into confusion and disarray by Covid-19, with some countries on vastly different levels of the awful “curve” to others.
It is probably safe to say, regrettably, that South Africa is among those lagging, with the worst of the virus still some weeks ahead.
With whispers that the country’s borders may only open to international travel early in 2021, the thought of the Boks going right through this year without a game cannot yet be written off.
Against such a backdrop (hopefully only a worst-case scenario), new head coach Jacques Nienaber and company may enter the new calendar year involved in their own race against time to “gel” their pivotal on-field alliances … dragging them closer to the Lions’ drawback.
*Rob Houwing is Sport24’s chief writer. Follow him on Twitter: @RobHouwing
