Will the Lions tour be the next covid casualty?

Uncertainty surrounds the prospects of the Lions tour this summer. Nobody can be surprised. Everything is uncertain now. Every shopkeeper, publican, businessman and teacher knows this. The NHS fears being overwhelmed. Politicians make decisions they may be forced to reverse tomorrow, or next week, or the month after. Covid is biting hard and nobody knows when it will relax its grip. For the moment, however, professional sport is still being played, and quite right too, for this relief much thanks.

If sometimes one feels mildly and momentarily ashamed of checking the score from the Test match in Sydney first thing on waking, before turning to other news, one may nevertheless be justified in doing so. Sport helps to keep one sane, even while recognizing that one is behaving a bit like Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in the Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes – two old buffers obsessed with the prospects for a Test match and paying no heed to the sinister goings-on in the train hurtling across Europe.

Still, back to the Lions. The series in South Africa is set for midsummer. Nobody knows how things will be then. There is no reason for thinking matches could be played in normal fashion there at that point. Admittedly, Test cricket was played in New Zealand last week, is being played in Australia now and is due to be played in Sri Lanka and India in the weeks ahead. But still, circumstances aren’t normal. Players emerge from their protective bubble and play either behind closed doors or before limited crowds – which isn’t always so limited, 30,000 spectators were admitted to each day of the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne, almost a third of the ground’s capacity.

Still, this is rather different from the Lions. One assumes that almost all the spectators at the MCG were locals. A Lions Tour is a tour not only in the playing sense of the word, it’s rugby tourism too. Tens of thousands of fans fly from these islands to follow the Lions. Can the South African Government happily contemplate planeloads of British and Irish fans disporting themselves around the country for weeks? And can our Governments feel happy about their return to Heathrow, Cardiff, Dublin and Edinburgh?

On the other hand, South Africa needs, and would certainly like to have, all the money Lions tourists would spend in the Republic, and – who knows? – vaccination may have proceeded so successfully that even before midsummer the beastly little virus may have retired baffled, even defeated. Yet, deciding now to go ahead with the tour as scheduled looks like an almighty risk, and it’s questionable how long we can wait for a decision to be made.

So, what’s to be done? The obvious common-sense response would be to postpone the tour for a year, just as Japan and the International Olympic Committee did with the Games which were to have been held in Tokyo back in August. There are differences however, the only similarities indeed being that the Olympics and Lions Tour are both very popular and each happen only every four years. But the Olympics are the world’s greatest sporting event, while to be honest, a Lions tour nowadays, no matter how popular, is really only three more Test matches in an already very crowded calendar. So, while everybody could accept the postponement of the Olympics for twelve months, pushing the Lions tour back to the summer of 2022 disrupts other touring plans, and does so a year before the 2023 Rugby World Cup. It seems unlikely that England’s coach Eddie Jones would be happy to see his plans disrupted by having to leave most of his first choice XV out of whatever preparations he has in store for that summer. While some might not be displeased to see Mr Jones unhappy, Irish, Welsh and Scottish coaches might be likewise disgruntled. Ireland, for instance, have a three-Test series in New Zealand in 2022. How would they feel about losing some of their best players to the Lions?

All the same, postponement for a year is a sensible suggestion. There might even be a bonus: it is now looking very likely that this season’s Six Nations matches will be played either behind closed doors or before only a small crowd. It is all but certain that Six Nations matches in February and March won’t be the happy social events they usually are. It has been suggested that, if there is no Lions tour this summer, the Six Nations could be postponed until July and August, by which time we can hope to be at liberty again. Well, it’s an idea not without its attractions.

The idea of the Lions tour going ahead as scheduled but without spectators at the ground and without the carnival atmosphere generated by the touring fans and camp followers has been met with dismay. On the other hand, some have proposed that, if the Lions can’t tour South Africa, perhaps the Springboks could venture north into Lions country. This seems a rotten idea to me. What of their supporters? In any case it makes little sense. Would matches be played in the summer or in early Autumn? How would either please national coaches planning their own country’s Autumn internationals?

The truth is there is no agreeable Plan B. So, if the tour can’t happen as scheduled this summer, it should be written off as another Covid casualty.

Few will agree, but then few think, as I do, that the Lions are really a relic of the happy old amateur days, out of place in the professional era. Paradoxically they are also a very successful commercial venture. Yet the idea that four countries have to come together to beat one is an absurd anachronism.