Paul Lewis: Lions tours keep soul alive

By the time this is read, we will know whether the Lions have just lost their eighth consecutive test match.

Predictably, the drums have started to beat and the question raised: Should Lions tours continue?

What nonsense. The Lions, at all costs, must be preserved. They are a link with all that rugby was and could be again if the game can ever figure out a way to stop disfiguring itself with the flesh-eating disease of professionalism.

The Lions lost the last two tests against Australia in 2001, lost all three against the All Blacks in 2005 and the first two against the Boks this season.

In any other rugby team, this would be a damning indictment.

But the Lions are different; unique. They are the last true touring team and many will remember how they lit up the rugby and national landscape when they visited here in 2005 - in spite of (or perhaps partly because of ) some of the lunatic fringe stuff that came from head coach Sir Clive Woodward and the most bizarre selection ever made in a rugby team: PR man Mr Bean, sorry ... Alistair Campbell.

Professionalism has induced a bleak, soul-less calendar of a game. Test matches are played to earn money. More and more matches are played at all levels of rugby as more and more money is required. As yet more rugby washes over fans, the less they care.

The Lions are a welcome antidote to all that. Rugby's international rulers (if we may loosely call them that) seem to have lost sight of the emotional core of the game. It has become a tedious commodity - previously constructed by the angels; now made in China.

The Lions stand out as a beacon amid all this mundane, misguided fare. Take a look, if you didn't see it, at the second test between the Springboks and the Lions.

Some bonehead of a British rugby writer pronounced it the greatest game ever played. It might not have been that but it was a brutally intense, classic encounter with the battle for possession at a peak and the defences almost as lethal as if they'd all been armed with machetes.

Compare that with the tame fodder of the first three All Blacks tests this year. Would the Lions, on their South African form, have beaten the All Blacks 2009? Oh, yes indeed - and by a pretty wide margin too, I'd wager.

The Brits also haven't covered themselves in glory in the aftermath. Conveniently forgetting how they laughed up their sleeves after the 2007 World Cup at the bitter Kiwi reaction to the refereeing of Wayne Barnes, they reacted with savage criticism of the French referee Christophe Berdos for the sin of not sending off the eye-gouging Schalk Burger for the whole game instead of just sin-binning him.

The Brits might not have invented the word schadenfreude but they certainly invented the word hypocrisy (actually, the Greeks did but don't tell the Brits; they like to think they know best ... ).

When Burger was off, the Lions scored 10 points. What do they want? Winning matches by hoping people get sent off seems a woefully slim strategy and far from satisfying. Burger was also off the pace after recent injury. Fine player (when he's not searching in people's eyes for his loose change ... ) but the difference when Heinrich Brussow came on was clear.

No, the Lions lost that match and the previous test for two main reasons - they weren't good enough and, in common with most Northern Hemisphere teams, they simply couldn't summon the talent to come up with crucial scores.

We're talking tries, people. When the Lions team was announced, this column offered the opinion that it would be a 3-0 whitewash to the Boks. That it hasn't been won by wider margins is a surprise but is partly explained by the strange and wonderful creature that is coach Peter de Villiers; his selections and decisions.

The Lions seemed a combination chosen not tolose by much. Coach Ian McGeechan said he had chosen players to stand up to the forward might of the Boks; a defensive strategy if ever there was one.

But the Springboks are far more than the ball-tearing Boer brutes of yesteryear. They now have real athletes, real pace, real ball skills and the ability to score their way out of trouble; to win a game with skill and colour.

The Lions don't, for the most part anyway. I give you: Ronan O'Gara. Once in the test series, McGeechan changed tack and tried to pick a side that could 'play' - attack their way to victory.

The fact that they can't is an indictment of professional and northern rugby. In the 13 years it has been in existence, it has not solved the essential conundrum of the two hemispheres - the south has the real players and the style; the north has the real power and the money.

The north seems to create far fewer players of true attacking skill. Professional rugby hasn't changed that. If anything, it has firmed rugby's inclination to lock itself into parochial pockets of self interest, bound by the silver chains of TV money and sponsorships. More of the same cold porridge is served up at both ends of the planet instead of finding a way to have a truly global sport.

How else to explain the fact that Argentina, third best side in the world at the 2007 World Cup, still can't be fitted into an international competition, north or south?

The Lions stand out as an oasis in this desert of professional self-mutilation. They have the best fans in the world; who travel to the ends of the earth to see them play; the players love being Lions; the tours electrify rugby countries like no others; the quality of the matches is high and the intensity even more so.

Of course, the Lions must survive. Their loss would also be rugby's. But find a way to make them win - and stop blaming the ref.