JIM TELFER was not best pleased. “For God's sake cut it out,” he snarled at Mark Regan and Barrie Williams, two of the three hookers in the 1997 Lions party, as they came to blows during a scrummaging session in East London. “It'll be all over the papers.”
When your columnist gave vocal support to the flint-faced Scottish coach from his vantage point on the touchline – “You're dead right there, Jim” – his expression grew more thunderous still.
There's no pleasing some people.
These days, opportunities for Fleet Street smart-arsery are harder to find than a straight feed at the set-piece.
Journalists don't go to training any more because coaches don't trust them to keep secrets, which is fair enough: reporters are paid to report, not conceal. Otherwise, they'd be working for MI5.
All things considered, then, last week's minor kerfuffle about the leaking of the Lions Test team was an odd affair. The moment Warren Gatland informed the squad of his combination, he must surely have known that he was informing everyone else into the bargain.
Leaks have been a fact of life since Moses first played for the minis. Some players are on newspaper payrolls; some tell their agents, who quickly pass on the info to their favourite hacks; others simply get on well with individual Press men and routinely tip them the wink.
When Gatland announced his tour party back in May, he took great satisfaction in running rings round the correspondents with his left-field picks.
By giving the players nothing in the way of advance notice, he gave them nothing to leak.
Sounds like a plan for the rest of the tour.
