In the minutes before the Lions ran out to play the Queensland Reds in Brisbane, Maro Itoje gathered his players together in the dressing room and appealed to their inner grunt.
The captain made a point about wanting to play hard and direct rugby. “Get us through the front door,” he demanded of his team. “Forwards – set the tone with our physicality.”
And that’s the ongoing confusion with these Lions. They have all the artillery they need to blast through the guts of any team in Australia, but they just haven’t done it nearly often enough.
Head coach Andy Farrell has said regularly that the Lions are absolutely at their best when driving at the heart of the opposition and then, when they have them beaten up, playing from there. It’s like that old line about the first step to making chicken soup – catch a chicken.
And yet against the Waratahs they were still shovelling the ball out the backline without doing the hard yards up front. They should be better than this. They are better than this.
Last month, Itoje addressed some of the side-to-side stuff the Lions delivered in the defeat by Argentina and called it “tippy-tappy”. And it’s still a bit tippy-tappy.
Now that the Test series is looming on the horizon, maybe they’re about to unload. Maybe now is the time the hounds of hell are unleashed and the gameplan shifts to a more balanced and more belligerent version of what we’ve seen so far.
Before the Brumbies game, Itoje was asked if more direct rugby was in the offing. “That’s definitely the ambition,” he replied.
“Rugby doesn’t change too much, whether it’s under-14s rugby or the Lions. You have to go forward. You have to earn the right – the famous saying – to go wide. And that is definitely the case for us. We need to punch holes, get forward, then space opens up, wherever that may be.”
Does he feel they’ve been too lateral in their attack on this tour?
“At times, perhaps. At times we’ve been very good in playing direct and playing through teams. But at times we probably look to go wide before we earn the right.”
And going wide before earning the right to go wide is why they ran into so much trouble against the Waratahs, who were waiting for them. The amount of handling errors from exceptionally talented players was maddening – not quite self-defeating, but a little too close for comfort.
