Lions captain Brian O'Driscoll leaves the field injured during the 1st Test match between the All Blacks and the Lions. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Lions captain Brian O'Driscoll leaves the field injured during the 1st Test match between the All Blacks and the Lions. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Patrick McKendry recalls three Lions controversies in New Zealand.
1. That spear tackle
In the opening minutes of the first test in 2005, Lions midfielder Brian O'Driscoll was dumped on his shoulder by Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu as they cleaned out a ruck. O'Driscoll dislocated a shoulder.
Those are the bald facts. Add in others; O'Driscoll was the Lions skipper and at the top of his game (the visiting media pack called him the best player in the world at the time), that one of those culpable was the All Blacks captain, that there was a perceived snub as neither All Black went back to check on O'Driscoll on the ground, and that neither Umaga nor Mealamu were punished, and it made for an explosive mix.
Neither the Lions nor the travelling media could let it go, and to be fair, New Zealand's supporters and media would probably have felt similarly if it was Umaga or first-five Dan Carter on the receiving end. The Irishman was ruled out of the game for five months.
But rather than fall apart under the resulting firestorm, the All Blacks were galvanised. When Umaga fronted the media in the days after, his teammates lined the stage in a gesture of solidarity.
The Lions were swept 3-0 in the test series, suffering their heaviest ever defeat in the second test in Wellington (48-18), but the discontent and resentment continued.
Umaga, now the head coach of the Blues who will play the Lions at Eden Park on June 7, the tourists' second match, wrote about the incident in his book.
"O'Driscoll kept going on about the fact that I hadn't rung him to say sorry," Umaga wrote. "I finally obtained his number and got hold of him but it wasn't a warm exchange.
"He was still angry that I hadn't gone over to see how he was, and once he'd got that off his chest, he accused me of being involved in a lot of off-the-ball incidents.
"When he started talking about off-the-ball stuff and me not being a gentleman, I thought, 'Oh, you're reaching now'.
"I never went out to commit foul play: I didn't punch guys on the ground or stomp on them. So I said, 'Oh well, mate, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I'm sorry for what happened to you but there was no intent in it; it was one of those unfortunate things that happen in rugby'."
"He said, 'Yeah, but you could've helped it.'
'Okay, mate,' I said, 'all the best.' And that was where we left it."
In a recent interview with the Newsroom website, Mealamu said he wasn't aware Umaga was on the other side of O'Driscoll when he went to drive him out of the ruck.
"It's one of the reasons I didn't go back to see how he was because it happened so quickly and I had moved on," said the former All Blacks hooker, who admitted to feeling "a little bit stink" about the way things played out.
"I just thought it was a typical rugby movement till I realised Tana was on the side and we had tipped him up and he had landed on his shoulder."
2. The 1971 Lancaster Park bloodbath
An exchange between Willie John McBride (left) and Colin Meads after the game. Photo / Herald Archive
Younger readers are unlikely to know much about the brutality that occasionally seeped into the game before it went professional. Those were the days when nearly anything was acceptable, and certainly it was if you could get away with it. There were no neutral match officials or citing officers, or even a realisation that acts of foul play had no place on a sporting field.
The match between Canterbury and the Lions in Christchurch in 1971 included many of these and more. Afterwards Ivan Vodanovich, the chairman of selectors and All Blacks coach, warned the Lions there would be "another Passchendaele" for the tourists if they persisted in killing the ball in rucks and obstructing in the lineout, a description that inflamed things further.
"Things went on that day in 1971 that had no place on a rugby field," Gerald Davies, a player that year and a manager of the Lions on their 1997 tour of South Africa, told the Guardian.
"We lost both our props [Ray McLoughlin and Sandy Carmichael], for the rest of the tour and at one point our captain, John Dawes, asked the referee to watch what was happening off the ball. His reply was that what happened behind his back was of no concern to him and that we had to deal with it. Jim Telfer had the same problem in 1966, describing it as the dirtiest game he had ever played in.
"When you toured in those days you had a home referee and touch judges, there were few, if any, television replays and there was no citing system. Players who indulged in incidents off the ball knew that there was little chance that they would be detected and as Lions we knew there would be attempts to test our inner resolve. Those days have gone ... very little goes on off the ball now that is not caught on camera. Miscreants are named and shamed. The game has moved on. Being physical now means imposing yourself in the tackle and at the breakdown, not punching someone from behind."
But Davies added: "It is not just teams in the countries the Lions have toured who have used roughhouse tactics. We have a fair history in Wales, right up until the end of old-style tours."
The Lions beat Canterbury 14-3 but the toll was high. They lost McLoughlin with a broken thumb and Carmichael with a multiple fracture of his left cheekbone. Irishman McLoughlin hurt his thumb when punching Grizz Wyllie in the head. Another Irishman, Fergus Slattery, was punched in the face after unwisely hanging on to Wyllie's jersey in a lineout.
It was reported that Carmichael was warned twice by Canterbury prop Alister Hopkinson to stop boring in on hooker Tane Norton but the opposing prop continued to infringe. He was punched more than once for his trouble.
Lions coach Sir Clive Woodward chats with Alistair Campbell. Photo / Getty
The appointment of Alastair Campbell as Clive Woodward's head of communications for the 2005 tour of New Zealand was always going ruffle feathers.
As one English journalist wrote, the controversial Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor, came with "more baggage than Gatwick" Airport, a point Campbell apparently made in a more subtle way to Woodward when he was asked to do the job.
Nevertheless, Woodward was determined to have a so-called heavy hitter on board for crisis management, and in one fell swoop the touring scribes were disgruntled before even getting on the plane.
There was a feeling that there was spin behind the long fall-out following the Brian O'Driscoll injury, that was played on so much by the Lions management in an attempt to deflect attention from the team's woeful performance in Christchurch, a test in which they were defeated 21-3 and lost 10 lineouts.
Before the test there was a staged photo of what was apparently a friendly chat between Woodward and first-five Gavin Henson after the Welshman had been told he wasn't playing in the test. Henson had just helped Wales to a Six Nations triumph. Woodward was aware the picture was being taken, Henson wasn't. It had Campbell's fingerprints all over it.
Not only that, before a press conference in which Henson was to presumably speak about his disappointment at non-selection, Campbell approached Henson with a sheet of paper. On it were several quotes Henson was expected to stick to.
One of them was: "Obviously, everyone wants to play in the tests, so there is bound to be some disappointment at not being selected for the first test. But competition was always going to be fierce and this is a squad of world-class players. The challenge for me now is to play to the best of my ability when selected, keep challenging, and keep learning from the experience."
As he later wrote about in his book, that is not how Henson felt at all. Instead, he was confused and angry. But Campbell knew best. "We've had a chat about it," he told Henson, "and we think this is the right way to go. It says it all, really. It'll save you having to talk to the media because they're obviously bound to want to ask questions."
Afterwards, in an account of the tour, Guardian journalist Richard Williams wrote: "There has been no more chilling incident in the entire world of sport this year than the one that occurred in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza hotel, Christchurch, last June, when Alastair Campbell approached Gavin Henson and thrust at him a piece of paper headed "Gavin Henson Quotes".
Daily Telegraph writer Paul Hayward wrote: "Taking Campbell on a sports tour is like hiring the board of BP to perform an oil change on your car. It was an aberration from start to finish because it undermined the credibility of everything the Lions management said, and sent reporters off in search of hidden agendas, whether or not there was one. Ours is the age of scepticism - and in this era spin doctoring is as dated and transparent as Uri Geller bending spoons through psychic energy."
Compounding the issue was a team talk that Campbell, who knows next to nothing about rugby, delivered during the tour around his experiences in war zones and politics. It did not go down well with every player. In fact, Ireland lock Paul O'Connell wanted to thump him.
Woodward's appointment was not a good one. But, as ever, a tour victory would have almost vindicated it. Instead, the Lions were terrible and the post mortems were particularly harsh.
