On Thursday, Andy Farrell over-reached a tad, but you knew where he was coming from. The coach said that his boys were bidding for history on Saturday as the only Lions team to win back-to-back series in the same country, 2013 and possibly 2025. He was wrong. It has been done before, but it is not common.
A better way of presenting it is that they are bidding to become only the second Lions team to go 2-0 up in a series in 28 years, only the third to do it in 51 years and only the seventh ever since this glorious thing started in 1888.
The ‘Everest’ tour of 1997 was the most recent time the Lions won the first two Tests of a series. Maybe it was a coincidence but the captain then, Martin Johnson, presented the jerseys to the team on Thursday evening in Melbourne.
Four of Farrell’s starting line-up on Saturday were not born back then (Chessum, Tom Curry, Tommy Freeman and Dan Sheehan), two of them were a year old (Andrew Porter and Hugo Keenan), Itoje was two, Huw Jones was three, Finn Russell was four and a handful of them were five. Bundee Aki was the oldest; he was seven.
So, 1997 is an alien world to them. Since then, after two Tests it has been 1-1 against Australia, 2-0 to the All Blacks, 2-0 to the Springboks, 1-1 against the Wallabies, 1-1 against New Zealand and 1-1 against South Africa.
At the MCG, if the Lions live up to their billing of screeching hot favourites, we will be heading into terrain we have not been across in close to three decades.
There is a giant caveat in all of this. If we are examining the scale of the achievement if the Lions were to pull it off then you have to measure the quality of the opponent.
Unless the Wallabies can stir themselves in an almighty way, they are in mortal danger of going down as the one of the worst crews the Lions have faced in the modern era – or pretty much any other era.
