Battling the Lions: 1983, the tour from hell

You sensed you'd boarded the wrong bus on the night of the first test.

It was 1983, Christchurch and Ciaran Fitzgerald's Lions had just lost 16-12, throwing away a glorious chance of a decisive try when the Welsh centre, Robert Ackerman, failed to pass to an unmarked colleague yards from the line.

As if that wasn't bad enough for the press contingent, the words of English wing John Carleton later that night made things even worse.

"I'll tell you now, we'll lose this test series 4-0. There's so much already wrong about this tour I can't see any other possible outcome," he said.

Carleton was spot-on. It became the tour from hell, even worse than Phil Bennett's doom-laden trip six years earlier when bad weather followed the Lions around like a stalker and the Lions lost the series 3-1.

Fitzgerald, criticised by the media because he refused to drop himself and allow the more mobile Scottish hooker Colin Deans to get a chance, suffered largely in silence. But 1983 was a Lions tour which was all wrong from the start.

The selectors had invited Willie John McBride, who was by then coaching Ulster, to London for an interview. As a potential Lions coach, everyone thought. Except that, a few days later, they called McBride at his Northern Ireland home and asked him if he'd mind very much going instead as manager! McBride blinked. Well, who is the coach he asked? Jim Telfer of Scotland was the reply.

Telfer, austere, schoolmasterly and intolerant, was far from the ideal choice. He didn't know when to take his foot off the accelerator in terms of heavy training sessions.

He even had the Lions out training for more than two hours on the day before the final test in Auckland, when the whole squad were exhausted, ravaged by injuries and just desperate to get home.

The result? The Lions had nothing left to give, got wiped away 38-6 in the last test, lost the series 4- 0, and went down as one of the worst touring squads ever seen in the country.

The loss of key players certainly hadn't helped. Terry Holmes, Jeff Squire and Ian Stephens flew home together, all injured early on. Bob Norster and Nigel Melville, Holmes' replacement, were also eliminated from the tour by injury. In all, the Lions called for six replacements.

But in McBride's later view, it was the poverty of the 1983 Five Nations Championship which had a direct bearing on the outcome of that Lions series. McBride says the overall standard was poor, with England, who had been expected to provide the bulk of the Lions party, having a disappointing championship. Similar things have been said before this 2005 Lions trip.

The 1983 Lions played 18 matches but lost six of them. The first three tests they lost by only 4, 9 and 7 points; reasonable margins.

But they went home ultimately as whitewashed tourists, a disappointing ending but probably an appropriate one for a squad which had never quite been good enough from the start.

* Peter Bills is a rugby writer with Independent News and Media in London