Rugby: Lions pay price for open-door policy

CAPE TOWN - The Springboks should confirm Southern Hemisphere rugby supremacy when they clinch the three-match test series against the Lions at Loftus Versfeld tomorrow.

This is nothing new in professional rugby. Since the advent of the World Cup, Southern Hemisphere nations have won every time, England's win in 2003 the sole exception.

That is no coincidence. Results over 22 years tell their own story: the Northern Hemisphere has constantly lived down to its own modest standards.

Myriad reasons exist for this state of affairs but one is the insidious but steady drift of Southern Hemisphere players into the Northern Hemisphere game chiefly for financial profit.

Teams such as the Lions are now starting to pay the price of this "open doors" policy.

Ireland have been unable to find a quality first five-eighths for years to mount a genuine challenge to Ronan O'Gara. The fact that Argentinian Felipe Contepomi has held down the No 10 jersey for Leinster, the powerful Irish province, is hardly unconnected.

In England, once Jonny Wilkinson started to be bedevilled by injuries post the 2003 World Cup, no quality alternative emerged. The fact that the English clubs employed No 10s from France, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia was also hardly a coincidence.

Harry Ellis is a courageous, determined halfback, yet his ability to win a Lions place from the backwaters of the Leicester second team tells all regarding the poverty of classy alternatives. Leicester downgraded him last season in favour of Frenchman Julien Dupuy.

All over the English premiership and increasingly in Wales and Ireland, the influx of overseas stars, which has become a floodtide, is threatening to cause major long-term damage to the structure of the game in the British Isles and Ireland. The Lions are just the latest casualty of that state of affairs.

The Lions lost test series in 2001 in Australia, 2005 in New Zealand and will almost inevitably suffer the same fate on this 2009 tour of South Africa.

They have just one true world-class player, Brian O'Driscoll, who has formed an exciting, wonderfully skilful and entertaining midfield partnership with the young Welsh centre Jamie Roberts. The pair represented the sole threat to South Africa in last week's first test.

But a wider question needs to be considered. If the Lions are to be consistently beaten, providing only a token challenge that quickly withers, what value do they have in the modern game? Are they to become solely an excuse for the host union to make riches when they tour and up to 30,000 fans from the Northern Hemisphere enjoy boozing-up for a month?

If so, you're likely to hear the weeping from all across the Northern Hemisphere at such a sad state of affairs.

The Lions concept is a marvellous one yet commercial pressures, greedy administrators and selfish selectors are combining to bring about their downfall. On this tour of South Africa, the tourists have not confronted one genuinely full-strength team, last Saturday's test excepted.

Consequently, crowds have been sparse, further alienated by the outrageously costly tickets imposed by the greedy South African Rugby Union.

All this is depressing enough but the poverty of the Lions' play intensifies the sadness and disappointment.

Unless you believe in miracles or have consumed too much South African wine, you can hardly believe the Lions will triumph tomorrow in Pretoria and again next weekend in Johannesburg to clinch the test series.

No Springbok team have lost back-to-back tests on the high veld in their history, dating back to 1891, a daunting, sobering statistic. The likeliest outcome is 3-0 to the Springboks and, you have to say, the only sane result given the huge variance in quality and playing abilities of the players in the respective squads.

Indeed, anything less would be a gross indictment of the South African coaching team and their players.

This tour has raised all manner of questions about Northern Hemisphere rugby and the future of the Lions.

Past years have seen some pretty ordinary Lions parties: 1966 and 1983 in New Zealand would be pretty high up that particular list of shame.

But at least then you could argue that was the amateur era, and fortunes ebbed and flowed. You could also point to the 20-plus matches tour schedule that meant the Lions played the length and breadth of this country, allowing everyone with an interest in the game from Wanganui to Wellington, Timaru to Hawkes Bay, to see them in the flesh. And, marvellously, the locals turned out.

This truncated 2009 tour, the shortest in Lions history, has been a very different story. From a Northern Hemisphere perspective it has made for grim viewing.

If this proves, in the fullness of time, to have been the tour that represented the beginning of the end of Lions tours, then all manner of people ought to find themselves in the dock, not least the greedy South Africans who have regarded the whole thing as little more than a money-making exercise.

World-champion rugby nations ought to be of a stature that decrees better behaviour and a wider vision concerning the good of the game everywhere, than that sort of self-interested attitude.

Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria, 1am tomorrow

SOUTH AFRICA
Frans Steyn
JP Pietersen
Adi Jacobs
Jean de Villiers
Bryan Habana
Ruan Pienaar
Fourie du Preez
Pierre Spies
Juan Smith
Schalk Burger
Victor Matfield
Bakkies Botha
John Smit (c)
B du Plessis
Tendai Mtawarira

LIONS
Rob Kearney
Tommy Bowe
Brian O'Driscoll
Jamie Roberts
Luke Fitzgerald
Stephen Jones
Mike Phillips
Jamie Heaslip
David Wallace
Tom Croft
Paul O'Connell (c)
Simon Shaw
Adam Jones
Matthew Rees
Gethin Jenkins

South Africa: Chiliboy Ralepelle, Deon Carstens, Andries Bekker, Danie Rossouw, Heinrich Brussow, Jaque Fourie, Morne Steyn.

Lions: Ross Ford, Andrew Sheridan, Alun Wyn Jones, Martin Williams, Harry Ellis, Ronan O'Gara, Shane Williams.