THE bottom line in Lions tours is that the Big Top is still open for business when the circus rolls into the last town. That town is Johannesburg, no more than 45 minutes down the N1 from Pretoria, but for the tourists it will feel like a marathon. G
etting out of bed this morning will be hard enough; facing another week at the end of which is a game that doesn't matter, is the kind of torture that goes with Lions tours.
In this instance the pain is acute. They lost the series by an aggregate of eight points and the effort in staying that close to the Springboks has cost them heavily in human resources as well as emotion. Only Harry Ellis and Scotland's Ross Ford remained on the bench yesterday, and none of the five changes was tactical.
We can expect the Springboks to rest a few of their front-liners for Ellis Park on Saturday but even then you'd be unsure how much that it will ease the job for the Lions. They're out on their feet, and even those who are fit to step forward now do so in that most sterile of atmospheres – the dead rubber.
Did we get value from the experience? Did we what? This was an extraordinary game of rugby, almost a direct turnaround from Durban. Where a week ago the Lions' vital signs were all flashing red after ten minutes – at which point they had been ten points down – this time the Boks got to feel the pain of watching things go wrong around you.
So for the second week they greeted the final whistle with huge relief. In Durban they had survived a 14-point comeback, here in Pretoria they had mounted one of their own, and it was only completed in injury time with replacement Morne Steyn's 53-metre penalty after Ronan O'Gara had hit Fourie du Preez in the air when the Sprinbok was fetching O'Gara's kick.
The Ireland outhalf had only been brushed aside by Jaque Fourie whose drive for the line, on 74 minutes, had given the Boks the lead for the first time. And even after that the Lions managed to level it. It was that sort of game. It was also a contest that should have been uneven in numbers from the first minute after Schalk Burger, winning his 50th cap, gouged Luke Fitzgerald. It happened directly after the kick-off had ended in a ruck and evidently was picked up straight away by touch judge Bryce Lawrence.
It is inconceivable that if a player is being penalised for a facial – and a fairly blatant one from first viewing – that somehow it should be mitigated to a yellow card on the spot. If it was worth penalising then it was a red-card offence. Between Lawrence and referee Christophe Berdos they bottled it. Match officials should pay for mistakes like this by being removed from the panel.
Steyn was a hero in this part of the world before he nailed the touchline conversion of Fourie's try – which took an age to come back from TMO Stuart Dickinson, and was delivered without conclusive evidence – and then added the match-winning penalty, having pulled a drop goal moments earlier.
To their credit they held their nerve when the Lions not only started like a different team, but then refused to go away when the momentum had swung in favour of the home side in the last quarter. Nobody typified that stubbornness more than Simon Shaw. On his first Test start on his fourth Lions tour, Shaw was immense.
Even here in Pretoria there was no argument when he was announced as man of the match.
The Lions were uncomfortable at times at the breakdown but you imagine how much easier this would have been against a back row of two, as it should have been. Critically they had a good start to sustain them, with Stephen Jones – flawless with a right boot which delivered 20 points – knocking over the penalty against Burger, and then adding the points out wide from a fine finish by Rob Kearney after seven minutes.
It wasn't all plain sailing though. The Boks had been rattled, but at the end of the first half they managed to pull back three points with a long-range effort from Frans Steyn.
Without that the Lions would have led 16-5 at the break for even though JB Pietersen skated over in 12 minutes, it hadn't derailed the Lions. Pienaar was out of sorts and Frans Steyn missed one himself while Stephen Jones had taken three from a drop goal.
Early in the second half we moved to uncontested scrums after Gethin Jenkins and Adam Jones went off almost together, but another Stephen Jones penalty, on the hour, put the Lions 19-8 in front. Enter Bryan Habana, with the tourists tiring, three minutes later to close the gap and transform the game.
The odds shortened dramatically on the Boks at that point but with players going down as if their batteries had run out, the Lions hung in till the bitter end. And it was bitter. Unfortunately there is another week before the taste will even start to go away.
South Africa: F Steyn; JP Pietersen, A Jacobs, J de Villiers (J Fourie 56), B Habana; R Pienaar (M Steyn 61), F de Preez; T Mtawarira, B du Plessis, J Smit (capt), B Botha (A Bekker 59), V Matfield, S Burger (yc 1-10), P Spies, J Smith (D Rossouw 59; H B Brussow 62)
British and Irish Lions: R Kearney; T Bowe, B O'Driscoll (S Williams 65), J Roberts (R O'Gara 69), L Fitzgerald; S Jones, M Phillips; G Jenkins (A Sheridan 46), M Rees, A Jones (AW Jones 46), S Shaw, P O'Connell (capt), T Croft, J Heaslip, D Wallace (M Williams 69)
Scorers: South Africa – Tries: Pietersen, Habana, Fourie. Cons: M Steyn 2. Pens: F Steyn, M Steyn 2. Lions – Try: Kearney. Con: S. Jones. Pens: S. Jones 5. Drop goal: S. Jones.
Referee: C Berdos (France).
The full article contains 1030 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
