COLIN BOAG
The Lions tour of South Africa, despite the empty stadia, the Covid scares, and so on, is still all about the rugby, so why did Sky feel the need to have a twohour (!) build-up, and a 90-minute post mortem for the First Test? We want to watch the rugby, so does the nonsense that surrounds the game add to the experience, or detract from it?
We had the obligatory clips of previous Lions tours, the mandatory view of Table Mountain, and then snippets of fans showing how excited they were. The studio pundits were an impressive line up, with Lions royalty in Sir Ian McGeechan, the ever impressive Maggie Alphonsi, Sam Warburton, and, via video link, the coaching star of the moment, Ronan O'Gara – so far so good.
However, we then went to Greenwood who was described by front man Alex Payne as having gone ‘full Travis Bickle' – Robert De Niro's character in Taxi Driver, and probably the kindest thing to say is that Greenwood looked no more ridiculous than the origi-nal in 1976!
So it went on, if not endlessly then it seemed that way: profiles of Faf de Klerk followed by more analysis, this time by Greenwood and Warburton. Let me come clean, I struggle with Will Greenwood's punditry, as I always feel he's talking down to the audience, and seems to love nothing more than making the game complicated.
Someone Tweeted that if he had been paid by the word he could have retired after the game!
It was 90 minutes before we saw real, live rugby players warming up, and the will to live started to return, but the kick-off was still half an hour away! There were more fillers, and more adverts and we were down to the final 15 minutes and, miracle of miracles, after a few trips down memory lane, and some hyperbole about conquering Everest, Payne handed us over to Conor McNamara, Nigel Owens – who's been outstanding on this tour – Greenwood, and Warburton. I'd have been happy if the programme had started at this point – pictures of the players on screen as we were taken through the Lions' and the South African teams. Incidentally, the news that Miles Harrison plans to be back for the third Test is great news.
Why on earth did Sky feel the need to drag the preamble out for such a long time? No doubt when kick-off came it was greeted with a huge collective sigh of relief ! As one fan Tweeted: ‘More sport, less talking please'.
Rassie Erasmus wins the prize for weirdest contribution by a director of rugby for his video rant. He's annoyed that on Sunday evening Nic Berry and Joel Jutge didn't talk to him, and that theirs and World Rugby's schedule was different to the one he'd have liked – it took him almost 15 minutes of rambling to spit that out! In that time he twice offered to step away from his role – all you can say is well done to Warren Gatland for getting into his head so comprehensively!
However, it would be foolish to ignore him going public in this way, despite its almost total lack of class. It's a breach of the protocol that pre-vents coaches from criticising refs, and World Rugby don't like it, but some of the decisions he highlights should be subject to scrutiny, as not for the first time on the Lions tour the officials fell well short of Test match level.
The standard of refereeing in the southern hemisphere is way below that in the north, and it's time it was called out. The vastly experienced Jutge is World Rugby's head of match officials, and he needs to get onto the SANZAAR nations to find ways of improving the standard of their refs.
