What is the best measure of success for a British & Irish Lions tour? The three men with a seat at the top table during Andy Farrell’s inaugural press conference on Thursday had their own answer. For Farrell, it is all about the score in the Test series. The rest, the warm‑up Test, the tour games, are all just part of the preparation.
“It is about being successful,” he said over and over again. The rest of it, which he described as the “brand of rugby” and “all those bits”, are someone else’s business. Farrell is in it for the winning, same as he has been ever since he made his rugby league debut for Wigan in 1991.
As the Lions chairman, Ieuan Evans, said, “that hunger, that determination to get over the line” seems to “ooze from Andy’s every pore”. Farrell is a hard man and listening to him talk you felt sure his side of the business is in good hands. He was not interested in questions about how crowded the schedule is, queries about whether he had enough time to work in, whether he was worried about being able to pick players from France’s Top 14 or if he was confident the team would be ready for the first Test. A Lions tour, he said, is a matter of whether you’ve “got the minerals” to win or not. Simple as that.
“You know, back in the day and not too long ago, teams were playing for five trophies and the backlog of games they had was astounding compared to what we have now,” he said. “And did they complain? They didn’t complain. Because that’s how it was. Since then things have changed and people can have an excuse or a whinge, but this is touring in its purest form and for me it’s how touring should be. There’s no excuses not to be ready for that first Test match.”
If the Lions do lose it, well, “if you can’t pick yourself up off the floor you’re the wrong type of character anyway”.
Then there is the Lions’ CEO, Ben Calveley, who used to work for UK Sport, then the Six Nations and the Rugby Football Union. Calveley could not help himself talking about the Lions as a “property” rather than a team. He seemed most exercised by the idea of the deal they may strike for their next behind-the-scenes documentary of the tour. There is more appetite than ever for this sort of material, with Netflix launching its Six Nations documentary on Monday. As Calveley pointed out, the Lions have been doing it since 1997. “We will want to do something in ’25 that brings the fans as close to the action as they possibly can.”
He said it was not clear what form the documentary would take. “But the key for us is that we won’t want to do something the same as every other sporting property or just repeat what we’ve done on previous tours.”
Calveley’s pitch for the streaming services is that the Lions “can reach parts of the sports-loving public that other properties can’t and we’ve got to harness that for the good of the game”. By his measures, the grim 2021 tour to South Africa, held in the height of the pandemic, counted as a triumph on the grounds that “we saw record numbers of engagement from the fans, virtually”.
Last of all there was Evans, whose career spanned three Lions tours across the amateur and professional eras, and knows better than Calveley, and perhaps better than Farrell, too, that there is more to it than numbers, whether they are the ones the Lions rack up in those three Test matches or the sort that come with a pound sign in front of them and a lower-case “m” at the end. The Lions need to win, and to make money doing it, in order to exist, but they do not exist in order to do either. A Lions tour is a matter of hearts, minds and good times. It is the game’s great coming together.
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Evans spoke about performance and the need to win the Tests from the point of view of a man who won two of the series he played in but lost a third, 2-1 to the All Blacks, when they let a 10-0 lead slip in the deciding match.
“I remember the ’93 tour as one that got away, one we should have won, and one of my biggest disappointments in life. And I don’t want these players to look back on their tour and think: ‘That’s one that got away,’ because that is the worst feeling in the world.”
But he spoke, too, about the ethos behind the Lions and the idea that it is more than just another handful of matches in the professional calendar. It is a fillip for the sport and everyone in it.
“The Lions is not a development tour, but development is a by-product of being on that tour,” he said. “You come back as a better player because the environment demands it. Your fellow players demand it of you, the coaches demand it of you, the opposition demands it of you, the scrutiny demands it of you. Whoever goes will come back better for it.”
