THESE warts-and-all incidents explain why neutral referees and officials are required on Lions tours.

The Lions controversies of modern tours are wellknown, especially the 1971 and 1974 tourists protecting themselves because they knew the home referees would not.

However, although a similarly uncompromising outlook was successful for the 1989 Lions, there was no escape from Aussie referee Brian Kinsey’s last-minute travesty of a call which handed the 1993 First Test to New Zealand.

It was the same again with the Schalk Burger eye-gouge on Luke Fitzgerald in the 2009 series in South A...