Lions Tale is the Twist

Lions tale gives twist to end of season 05/03/05

It would be interesting to set 6 Nations supporters a test: name every club in the Zurich premiership. And for those feeling smug after Question One, how about every team in the Celtic League? Each Welsh district should be correctly punctuated, and additional points will be awarded for the colour of the jerseys.

A September-to-May League with a full complement of teams creates a long and involved narrative, with occasional climaxes balanced by inevitable slack periods. The domestic leagues are the War and Peace (or as the collisions get fiercer, the War and More War) of the season’s rugby competitions. They fascinate committed students and professors of the game.

The racier narrative provided by the 6 Nations is more like a Gerald Seymour thriller, a quality-assured annual best-seller. The pacing is perfect. Fifteen games over a six-week period allows excitement to build without distracting from individual encounters. Coaches then have time to regret criticising the officials before the process begins again. Although outbreaks of brilliance are random, there are enough permutations to mean they’ll always happen somewhere, and usually sometime soon.

The characterisation is equally reliable. Over the brief period of the tournament the faces stay largely the same, and we can therefore see personalities develop as the players separate into major and minor protagonists. Martyn Williams is tested by ordeals in various European cities and grows into his role as a hero. Mathew Tait turns out to be a first draft cameo, later deleted. Only Brian O’Driscoll remains unbelievable, consistently too good to be true.

The 6 Nations also has its plot, if only to make sure the French have something to lose. In recent years, with England and France dominant, the plot of the tournament has been a relentless realist saga of might equalling right. This year, we have Cinderella fever. The two ugly sisters in uptight blue and white are on their backsides, and for those fans delivered to the game on the back of the 2003 World Cup, it’s time to appreciate that the glass slipper doesn’t always fit the English foot. This season, the Welsh and Irish have total control of the Ball.

The autumn internationals simply don’t have the time to establish this kind of interest, nor the scope to throw up so many subplots and variations of genre. Alongside this year’s fairy-tale, we’ve had the ghost story subplot of England’s haunted pack. Grewcock and Corry are good, but they’re not Johnson and Dallaglio, and never will be. Everyone knows this, friend and enemy alike, and the ghosts of triumph past spook this England team at every hesitant step.

The long historical perspective of the tournament then adds timeless themes. We have national identity. Effort, pride, revival, or in the case of Scotland, the infinite keening from their Celtic twilight for the better days forever left behind.

Today’s one-off Tsunami match at Twickenham doesn’t claim to offer a comparable experience. It’s a different type of event, a spectacle rather than part of a narrative, a single picture and not a story. We therefore shouldn’t expect the same return from it, especially as the greatest exhibition match ever, the 1973 Barbarians-All Blacks, was actually part of a series. It was the epilogue to a narrative that started with the Lions’ unbeaten tour to New Zealand in 1971, a final pulsating game in a series with epic momentum. As such, it had all an epic’s attendant possibilities for triumph, disaster, and divine intervention. Otherwise known at that time as Gareth Edwards.

The twice-weekly challenges of a Lions tour tell a story as captivating as the 6 Nations or the running drama of a World Cup. This partly explains why the Lions concept is thriving even in an era when games against the Southern Hemisphere are commonplace. One-off matches are simply less intriguing. The latest instalment of the Lions thriller is imminent. It promises to take all the liveliest characters and the best bits of business from this year’s 6 Nations and throw them into a still unimagined story. With new costumes and an exotic location.

A best-seller already, before a word’s been written.