The last four-Test series ended at Eden Park on July 16, 1983 when the Lions disappeared without trace, exactly as Shergar had done rather more ominously a few months earlier.
The next one kicks off this month; four Tests on successive Saturdays between the perennial superpowers of the game, a quadruple whammy of magnetic appeal made all the more since the Nations Championship declared such a fixture out of bounds.
New Zealand’s eight-match tour of South Africa starts in Cape Town on Friday under the banner of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry, a title whose accuracy cannot be questioned for a whol...