Australian writers lionise team for victory

Australia's newspapers saluted the Wallabies yesterday after the team staged a stunning form reversal to beat the Lions and square the series.

Sydney's Sun-Herald ran a headline "Wallabies back from the dead, stay alive" and Greg Growden wrote: "Hail the comeback kings!"

"The Wallabies showed yet again that they are the world champions at overcoming adversity when they obliterated the Lions in an extraordinary second half."

Growden said Australia's first half was highly flawed, but in the second half they produced a monumental form reversal.

The Age in Melbourne ran a headline saying, "Australia dines out with red whine" and Mark Fuller wrote: "The 15,000 scarlet-clad fans of the Lions may not have been able to will their side to victory, but they generated an energy that illuminated the occasion."

In Britain, the tabloid News of the World headlined its report "Smashed to Brits," the report starting that the Lions "were reduced to quivering pussycats."

In the Sunday Times, Stephen Jones wrote that "it will take a mighty effort from the team's medical men and psyche-polishers if they are to win the decider."

On the topic of injuries, Jones was critical of Wallaby first five-eighth Stephen Larkham, who he said had a tendency to react to any bump "as if he had been hit by a rutting rhino."

Former Lions and Welsh flanker Eddie Butler, writing in The Observer, said the 10 minutes at the start of the second half decided the test.

"It was a depressing period for the tourists. Whatever they said to each other during the interval probably will not go down in the annals of stirring oratory," he wrote. "All the Wallabies who looked ponderous and out of touch just one week ago finished here in flying form."

Butler recalled a Wallabies' pledge before the series that "We shall be at our best in Sydney."

"Would that the Lions could now say the same thing."

- AGENCIES