CHRIS HEWETTGUEST COLUMNIST

There is something unnatural about writing the words “British and Irish Lions” and “social distancing” in the same sentence because there is no way of linking them without sounding hopelessly contradictory.They might be phrases from entirely different vocabularies, like “Steve Borthwick” and “blabbermouth”, or “Sam Burgess” and “Rugby Union”.On the great tour of South Africa in 1997, it was all “social” and no “distancing”. The first trip of the professional ...