In the third match of the tour, Lions captain Martin Johnson will be making his first tour appearance
RUGBY:Steve Morris
IT has been a while coming, but finally we will get our first live look at the player the pre-tour publicity has given Martin Johnson to be when he at last assumes the mantle of captaincy of the British Lions against Western Province on Saturday.
Johnson’s absence from the first two tour games – against an Eastern Province Invitation XV in Port Elizabeth and Border at the Basil Kenyon Stadium in East London – has been the cause for more than one eyebrow to be lifted.
But Lions manager Fran Cotton and team coach Ian McGeechan have been quick to dance across the hot coals of criticism and make nothing of the continued booking of a seat in the stand for Johnson. You can’t blame them. Johnson is perhaps the greatest asset the Lions have right now, given the problems Springbok coach Carel du Plessis has with assembling a physically and match fit second row.
McGeechan, as wily an operator as ever rugby has produced, has talked about team tactics and getting various combinations among the cream of the four Home Unions to know one another.
Cotton has trotted out the usual platitudes about giving every player on the tour a run as early as possible. Both may well have added a healthy spicing of veracity to their public statements in saying what they have. But, in essence, both men should be taken with a large dose of salt.
Cotton is also on record as saying that the provincial games do not matter a whit in the greater scheme of things for the 1997 Lions. It is the Tests – and only the Tests – that count.
There is also the inescapable fact that Johnson is due a groin operation in the off-season to obviate a niggle which has plagued him for a while; and that the rangy England lock has come through a gruelling season of 44 highly competitive matches.
In this, the Lions show the same type of psychology that was born of their predecessors in 1974 when John Williams – now the controversial coach at Northern Transvaal – was giving them some unwanted problems in the lineouts.
The Lions made an issue of calling him the “Jolly Jumper” on any public platform they could find … and Williams became a forgotten man in the muddled minds of a set of Springbok selectors who were only divided from outright panic and the chaos Willie-John McBride’s marauders were wreaking by a fingertip.
Clearly, Johnson has some problems with getting himself into gear to take on the physical way in which Springbok rugby is played. It is not a bad thing that Cotton and McGeechan want to save their best for the most important matches. And, given Western Province’s current form and their lack of Super 12 exposure, a run at Newlands does not have the inherent threat of a confrontation up front at Ellis Park, Loftus Versfeld or King’s Park.
In short, they are husbanding Johnson through the less important parts of the tour and looking to the internationals ahead. Good thinking.
This is not to infer in any way that Johnson and the rest of the Lions forwards are not possessed of steel cores. They are. No one hardened to the rigours of modern international rugby can be exactly labelled a ballerina.
And even the growing argument of the relative strengths of the game in the two hemispheres holds no water in the case of the Lions captain.
Had he not opted to play for England, he could well have been pulling an All Black jersey over his head, having represented New Zealand at junior level.
It all leads to the fact that while both Cotton and McGeechan have earned the wide respect they enjoy, it is better to look beyond the simple expedient of transcribing their public pronouncements for further broadcasting.
No coach, no manager, no real team man involved in a tour as tough and demanding as the one the Lions are currently undertaking is going to wear his heart on his sleeve … especially not for the consumption of the locals. They are professionals, here to do a job of work.
You have to look no further than the dust- up between the protagonists for the Test hooking spot in practise this week to know that there is a fierce flame of intent burning within the Lions camp. And well there should be. Competition – even at physical level – among team-mates for a Test place puts the management in a very comfortable position.
The somewhat banal art of koppestamp is as old a tradition elsewhere as it is in this country.
Cotton should know all about that on a personal level. As the incumbent in the 1974 Lions front row, he had to take on both everything South Africa could throw at him and the close attentions of Sandy Carmichael among his fellow tourists. Cotton earned every Lions jersey he wore on the practice field long before they played the national anthems.
One must suspect that all the real or imagined problems which face the Lions through lack of place-kicking and pace, the headaches which McGeechan says he is having in moulding a side into the machine he can fine-tune, are just so much grist for the mill.
It is also quite on the cards that the canny pair had settled on the core of their Test side long before they left home territory.
Johnson may well be sitting and taking in an overview of the men he leads as Cotton and McGeechan would have us believe. But at the back of it all, you also have to know that neither of the two men in the Lions management does anything without a pre- planned purpose.
Now we can sit back and see how good a player Johnson really is.