The words of Ireland and Lions rugby legend Keith Wood ahead of this weekend’s Lions tour kick off. Speaking to the Limerick Post at the recent JP McManus Pro Am launch, “Uncle fester” gave an insight into the Lions that few can achieve. Having toured twice with the Lions in 1997 to South Africa and again in 2001 to Australia, the Killaloe native knows what it takes to win a Lions tour in South Africa.
“It’s all about how they blend. It’s how the guys get together and get clued in. The first few weeks are crucial. If you look at it on paper, it looks like South Africa to win all the way and that is how the lads will want it. That is how it was in 1997 when I toured there. I will say though that the team the current side are facing is a stronger South African challenge than we faced in 1997. They are huge underdogs and that is almost a pleasure. There is something comforting about that when you are on tour and they have a great chance to do something special with that”.
With the 97 tour being named as the last “amateur” tour, even though the game was in it’s professional infancy, Wood maintains that the same ethos still applies to the modern rugby player and the modern Lions, “The Lions are the last bastion of the amateur days. I know it doesn’t seem like that as it is a huge income generator now, but there still is that element of the Corinthian spirit, which pits guys together who have been enemies all season. That is the essence of the Lions. That is what makes it so special. They have to do it. They have to blend as a team. It doesn’t matter how good the team is.”
With the squad now in South Africa and only days away from the first game, attention turns to the captain of coaches. The finer details will all need to be right for the panel to click. A point with which Keith agrees, “To make Paulie captain was a superb decision. It was well deserved. Paul has been playing great rugby and has matured in recent years too. You can see it in the nature of him. The Lions is something very big and all encompassing so it is a challenge, but Paul will stand up to that. He will bring his disappointments from this year down with him and that will help motivate the party, as for Mc Geechan, he is awesome, just awesome. He understands the nature of the Lions. You can be organised, technical and efficient, but you can do all that and miss what the Lions is all about. There is something different in playing for the Lions and that is something that Ian understands no end”.
As a shoe-in for test starts in his own tours, Wood was quick to point out that the tour is made on the players that take their chance to make a break. The so called ‘Bolters’. “There is an old saying in rugby, You are only an injury away. That is the nature of the Lions. You go on a tour and there are 10 guys that are in. If they play well, then they are in the Test side. Coaches will tell you that is not the way and that everyone has the same chance starting but they are 10 guys who will know that they are in. There are four or five more then who are around the fringes and waiting to be selected. Then you always get a bolter from the blue. I look at Keith Earls and I think that Keith has as good a chance as any to make the test team. He was picked as a bolter on the squad because they see him as a bolter for the test side. If Keith goes out there and settles for just being on a Lions tour, which I know he won’t, then he will not make the breakthrough. That is the same for all players.”
As a test member in 1997 Keith Wood will be remembered more for his antics off the field as well as on. The antics recorded for prosperity on the Living with the Lions DVD, a must see. However, the judge from that DVD is not a serial watcher as some rugby fans have become. “I watched it in 1997 and I haven’t watched it since. I won’t show it to my sons I’d say, but I will watch it again. I didn’t know at the time that I would be so prominent in the DVD, there was 170 hours of footage taken and they just decided to use a balding guy from Killaloe as one of the main men. It is interesting actually as they tried to emulate the same thing in 2001 and 2005 and failed miserably. That is due to asking questions. In 1997 no one asked the players or coaches a question. You were never interviewed. They just filmed and filmed and filmed. By the end you didn’t even know they were there. They were part of the tour and by the end of it, it turned out great.”
The other main man in that series and subsequent hit on Youtube is Jim Telfer, the Scottish forwards coach to the 1997 series winning Lions. “Jim was a pleasure to work with. I would have said that if we had lasted a day longer on the tour maybe we would have not gotten along. We were absolutely wrecked. He trained us into the ground, he ran us ragged. We all looked at Jim and said that we would do anything for him. He believed in us. He believed that this was the ultimate thing in his life and he had lived a life at that stage. You couldn’t but buy into that mentality.”
With Paul O Connell as captain then for this tour, like Martin Johnson in 1997, does Keith Wood see a similar result?
“At the moment it will be hard to pick a test team. It is hard for us to pick one because we don’t know who is going to be a good tourer or not. You don’t know how guys are going to blend. It is how the team get in together. If they work together then they will get there, if they don’t then they cannot win it. Where will it be won? It will be won by the team who work as a team more. You can look at some people like Brian O Driscoll and Alun Wyn Jones, but there are some guys who are going out there who are just great tourers. That was one of the reasons that Quinny was picked originally. He is a guy who is the life and sole of the team. He can be serious when he needs to be and can lighten the mood too. It will be a huge loss for Quinny missing out on the Lions. The weird thing about the selection process is that there are players of equal quality waiting to come in, so it is a bigger loss for Quinny, than for the Lions as a whole group. A lot will depend on Paulie. He needs to make certain that he has lads around him who can make the selections. There is no Irish, English, Scottish or Welsh now on this side. They are all Lions. Paul will need to surround himself with some lieutenants, who don’t have to be one from each country, they just need to be natural leaders who will help out on the decisions. This is a bloody big job.”
So will the test be a lot harder to win after such a fantastic and energy sapping season for Ireland rugby? “Of course. That is why it is so hard. Everything is stacked against them. Everything. It is how they deal with it after that is how they will win or lose.”
