Thrown to the lions

If there was ever any doubt that the four-yearly announcement of the British and Irish Lions touring party was a process hopelessly compromised by the protection of regional vested interests and the exercising of petty biases, then last week’s announcement of the squad for this summer’s tour of Australia finally dispelled it.

In my forty-seven years in the journalism business (he fumed, jowls growing more florid by the moment as the Hennessy took hold), I have rarely seen such an unashamed pig’s ear made of a straightforward selection process. The word “whitewash” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Last week Foul Play spent an afternoon on the blower to three of the Irish boys who had been called up for selection – namely Malcolm O’Kelly, Keith Wood, and Rob Henderson.

Each of them was far too diplomatic to actually come out and say it on the record, but there was no mistaking their sense of indignant befuddlement as to how the hell Wales had ended up with almost twice as many men in the squad as us.

One of them, who I can’t name for obvious reasons, seemed to question Lions’ supremo Graham Henry’s competence in a very roundabout way, before hastily adding, “But that’s off the record, and anyway I’m sure the lads that have been picked will do a fantastic job.” Cough.

And yet, one gets the feeling that if Henry’s day job involved coaching Ireland instead of Wales, the touring party would have contained not only the likes of near-misses Denis Hickie, Peter Clohessy et al, but also quite a few journeymen (by Lions standards) like Tyrone Howe and Peter Stringer, not to mention some wild cards such as Leicester’s Gordan Murphy, just for the hell of it.

For that, in all honesty, is what Henry has done. In studying the names of the panel that he, Donal Lenihan and Ian McGeechan have cobbled together, it is impossible not to conclude that in the aforementioned troika, he is very much first among equals.

There are ten Welsh players in the Lions squad. This is at least six more than the Principality deserves on the basis of its team’s mediocre showings in the truncated Six Nations championship.

Rob Howley and Neil Jenkins were obviously automatic choices. Scott Quinnell? Fine. Colin Charvis? A bit unrefined, but . . . yeah, we’ll wave him through.

After that, though, we enter the depths. And what makes it really strange is that Scott Gibbs, perhaps the finest centre of his generation, does not make the cut. It was not enough for them to saturate the squad with Welshmen; they had to fill it with mediocre ones.

It would be stretching it, admittedly, to call Wales a poor side. Certainly, they are not as crap as Scotland (who have three men in the 37-strong Lions squad), but then again that is hardly the kind of yardstick by which one should gauge a player’s suitability for a Lions tour.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, Dafydd James, last seen being embarrassingly brushed aside by Will Greenwood as the powerful English centre rounded off his hat-trick of tries under the posts in the Millennium Stadium back in February.

James has no more business being in the Lions squad than I have being on the cover of Elle magazine. And the really frightening thing is that he is by no means the most indefensible of the selections made by Henry and his cohorts (see below).

When the New Zealand-born Henry took the Wales job a few years ago, he immediately steered them to an eyebrow-raising run of consecutive victories that earned him the title of “The Great Redeemer”, a sobriquet which looks slightly ridiculous now.

Before foot and mouth decimated the Six Nations fixture list, Wales were having one of their typical in-out-and-shake-it-all-about campaigns: a win here, an annihilation by England there. Of such sterling feats are ten places in the Lions party seemingly earned.

The Welsh were routed 44-15 by England in that aforementioned mis-match last February, before they somehow contrived to draw with Scotland in one of the most error-strewn international fixtures of the past decade.

They did beat Italy and France, in mitigation. However, the Italians’ current role in the Six Nations championship, is essentially as a training exercise for the bigger powers before they take on each other; and putting one over on the worst French national team any of us can remember is hardly much of an achievement.

Obviously delighted by what he had seen, Henry called up the gnarled prop, Dai Young, who seems to have been knocking around since the time of the Punic Wars, and looks it at this stage – at the expense of John Hayes, who has enjoyed a superlative year for Munster and Ireland.

But he couldn’t leave it at that. In came Robin McBryde, Martyn Williams, Darren Morris . . . all rising without trace at the expense of better, more talented (but less Welsh) players.

What this means, particularly in the ranks of the forwards, is that if even one or two key men like Lawrence Dallaglio or Jason Leonard pick up injuries, the Lions have damn all hope of winning the series, because the cover simply won’t be there. Don’t say you weren’t warned, boy(o)s.