Chris Hewett: Southland-bound Lions have job to do

This will not come as any great consolation to those poor saps who did a job on Otago at the House of Pain on Saturday and are now contemplating a similar mission against Southland at the Igloo of Strain tomorrow night.

For the 2005 Lions, a flight to Invercargill has no romance about it whatsoever, for it means they are surplus to test requirements.

It is a dirt-trackers' trek, a trip nobody wants to undertake, a journey into the dark heart of bugger-all. Thanks a bunch, Sir Clive. Will you still recognise us when we get back?

But hold on just a second.

Those players asked to double up in the south of the South Island may one day come to look on their efforts as wholly worthwhile, especially if the test boys put one over the All Blacks this weekend and go on to sneak the series.

Ask Ian McGeechan, who has forgotten more about Lions touring than most Lions tourists will ever know.

On a trip like this, one significant victory outside the test arena can be definitive.

In 1989, the Lions were so smithereened by the Wallabies in the first of the three tests that there was every possibility of the wheels leaving the wagon for good.

Somehow, the midweek side - "Donal's Doughnuts" as they were christened in respect of their captain, the fine Irish lock Donal Lenihan - turned around a 10-point interval deficit against ACT in Canberra and ran out winners by 41-25.

McGeechan, the head coach on that tour, still regards that second-half performance as pivotal, a 40-minute resurgence that gave the Saturday side the impetus to snatch the test series 2-1.

Eight years on, something similar happened. The Lions had been badly outscrummaged in the early stages of their South African itinerary and had lost to Northern Transvaal in Pretoria. The next match, three out from the opening meeting with the Springboks, was critical - not simply because the opponents were Transvaal, that 15-man embodiment of South African rugby muscle, but because it was played at the great citadel of Ellis Park, a concrete expression of all that is most rugged and intense about the Bokke game.

Tom Smith and Paul Wallace, guaranteed front-row support staff when the tour began, scrummaged so well that they blasted Graham Rowntree and Jason Leonard out of the test reckoning; John Bentley scored one of the more memorable solo tries in Lions history; victory was secured, 20-14.

McGeechan, head coach again, put it in the same category as the Canberra experience. Once again, a tour was defined by those considered least likely to contribute to such a definition. Once again, the test series was won.

Woodward enjoys a mantra - when it comes to a decent one-liner, he is not a man to leave a dead horse unflogged - and his mantra on this tour runs along the lines: "Victory here will be secured by 45 players, not 15 or 22." In other words, a successful Lions tour is constructed from the bottom up rather than the top down, and the people at the base of the pyramid are the most important ones. If they give so much as an inch of ground, the crash of sporting masonry in the test centres will be heard a good deal further away than Invercargill.

Saturday's win over Otago may have been dismissed as a ho-hum effort by those New Zealanders who do not see beauty in an eight-man shove at the scrum, but it was bloody important to the Lions. Will they settle for something similar tomorrow? You don't even need to ask.

* Chris Hewett is a rugby writer for the Independent in London