There was OUTRAGE of the highest order yesterday, after Gatty unceremoniously dumped you-know-who ahead of the you-know-what on Saturday. The OUTRAGE bubbled and boiled at the injustice of dropping that-bloke-called-Brian and more than a few Irish fans declared themselves Wallaby fans ahead of Saturday.

And no doubt they are serious. Personally, we would find it pretty hard to cheer against any representative team containing Johnny Sexton, Sean O’Brien and Tommy Bowe (unless they all signed for Saracens), but it’s a very understandable emotion. We’ve talked before about how many fans feel they don’t really have a stake in the Lions and how it’s tough to really buy into the team, so it’s quite obvious how disappointment can breed resentment.  It’s easy to talk about getting behind the Lions and how there are no nationalities, just 15 Lions (though this is easier said when the team is full of your own national heroes!), but deep down, it doesn’t really work that way for anyone.  At the end of the day, folk have an affinity with the players they adore for their club/province and nation.  There’s no instinctive reason to feel emotionally attached to a mainly Welsh team playing such reductive rugby – unless you’re Welsh, or really enjoy negative rugby.  The great binding force of the Lions crest can only get one so far, particularly when it has become so wearisomely rammed down supporters’ throats by the Sky machine.

While it’s difficult to completely disentangle one’s emotions after the whole BOD affair, it’s not so much the OUTRAGE over the dropping of Ireland’s national icon that is so deflating, but the message it sends out about the identity of this Lions touring squad.  It’s a sad indictment of this Lions coaching team when the most skilful players – Brian O’Driscoll and Justin Tipuric – are passed over for bigger chaps who can bosh harder.  Is this really the best the Lions can do?  I thought this was the pinnacle of the game, or something.

While we’ll be cheering for the Lions on saturday, there is a goodly portion of our being that feel the best result for all concerned is an Australia win.  This Lions squad simply doesn’t deserve to win the series (barring a sudden about-turn in performance and approach entirely out of keeping with the selection and the first two tests).  Sky will tell you that ‘immortality’ beckons for the winners, but does it really?  Immortality, for scraping out two wins (one of which was undeserved) against a misfiring Australia?  In what has been a lamentably poor quality series thus far, the Aussies have been the better side in all facets of the game, have shown occasional invention, been brave (foolhardy?) in selection (three debutants and a rookie outhalf for Brisbane), have at least two bona fide geniuses in their team and, crucially, have played all the rugby on offer (such as it has been).  They are far from a great team, and frequently go backwards in their attempts to attack, but at least they’ve tried to play with the ball.

This Lions team and squad is supposed to be the best the Northern Hemisphere (well, the old public school English-speaking Northern Hemisphere) has to offer – and they haven’t covered their Hemipshere (go Northern Hemisphere!) in glory. They have bished, bashed, shunted, huffed, puffed and boshed (in the Tests) – which should have been expected, to be frank.

This years Six Nations was an utter abomination. It started and ended brilliantly, involving the best and worst of the Welsh, but in between, plumbed the depths – the Wales-France game was simply appalling and England and Ireland got more and more dismal as the tournament progressed. And the domestic competitions weren’t much better – the Heineken Cup was dominated by the French, and won by a bosh-and-bullet bunch of mercenaries whose only try in the knock-out stages involved Europe’s most dislikeable player. Ulster and Leinster served up a decent Pro12 final that befitted a rejuvenated competition, but only Leicester Tigers really got the pulses racing.  When you’re relying on the Tigers for attacking rugby, well…

The Lions are essentially composed of Leicester and Leinster players bolted onto the (Six Nations winning) Wales squad – and it’s been grim to watch. If the Lions do manage to win in Sydney, it will be a disaster for Northern Hemisphere rugby – a Neanderthal gameplan that prizes brawn over brain will have prevailed and will doubtless become orthodoxy all the way to RWC15. At least Ireland can rely on Joe Schmidt to buck the trend, but on the squidgy February pitches even he will be up against it.  Where are the skills? Where is the daring? I’m sure we aren’t alone in thinking players don’t need to be from below the equator to be able to play an enterprising and watchable brand of rugby, while retaining enough forward power to get the Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeave going.  Fancy the Lions Tour commemorative DVD under your Christmas tree?  No thanks.  But… Immortality!

Ultimately, wouldn’t it be better to come home in a welter of hand-wringing, wondering why the best that four Nations has to offer couldn’t beat a Wallaby team that was begging, begging, to be beaten. There’s something unsettling about the thought of Gatland being vindicated having presided over such a dispiritingly awful series and after his grandstanding in dropping Brian O’Driscoll.  In Sydney, we’ll be hoping the Lions come out, and contrary to all the pre-match signifiers, give it a good lash, play some decent stuff, show well (all of them, not just the Irish), contribute to a great game of rugby and thrash the Aussies by four tries to one.  But if they set their stall out to grind and bosh their way to a win, there will be a considerable dose of schadenfreude in Cordite Towers if they get what they deserve, which is to lose.

Post-script: re the OUTRAGE – have we really gone for the ‘Justice for BOD’ line? Justice? Really? Too strong? Maybe we should ask the Egyptian public their thoughts on this ‘injustice’?

Ha!  What was our headline again?  ‘Get Quick Ball. Use Quick Ball. Repeat’, was it?  Joke’s on us.  ‘Hoof ball. Chase ball. Repeat’ would be more like it.  What looked, optimistially, to be a team selection to move the point of attack in fact turned out to be one sent on to the pitch to chase high balls.  It was puke rugby and the Lions deserved to lose.

Warren Gatland stands to be castigated for exceptionally reductive, negative tactics in a second test which was there for the taking against a nervous, mistake-ridden Australia.  But by relying on chasing (admittedly pretty accurate) garryowens and winning (admittedly superbly contested) turnovers on the deck, and refusing to try and play rugby with ball in hand, the Lions found themselves hoping to defend their way to victory.  Eventually the dam burst.  The Lions can point to how close they were to a series win, but the truth is that had Leali’ifano been kicking last week the series would be over.  Sure, Australia played as if they had a rifle pointed at their feet and their finger on the trigger for most of the game, intent as they were to throw the ball forward, but eventually the passes stuck, the fly-half found a running angle, and they came up with the winning score.

The most damning statistic in the ESPNscrum.com horror-show was that Johnny Sexton passed the ball ten times in the match (second most damning statistic: 15 of 20 Lions had more tackles than metres carried).  The Lions have a huge advantage at fly-half, where Europe’s finest is facing off against a player who is unfamiliar with the requirements of the position at test level. Instead of trying to press home that advantage, they have him performing a role that his deputy, the obviously inferior Owen Farrell, could easily manage.  What are they thinking?

Gatland can argue that the intention was not to reduce the gameplan to kicky-kick, and that the lack of go-forward ball presented to the halves necessitated that they adopt a conservative approach.  Fair enough, but with the team he put out, is it any wonder?  It was pretty obvious that with the backrow and centres selected, the Lions were going to struggle to get over the gainline.  Gatland could have picked any or all of Sean O’Brien, Toby Faletau or Manu Tuilagi but declined on all three counts.  The media are only too keen to paint Dr. Roberts as a panacea to all their woes, but that overlooks the fact that there were alternatives in place to compensate, and also that Roberts hasn’t really played very well at all since Hong Kong.  He’s a fine player, but doesn’t have a magic wand (he has started 5 games against Australia and lost 4) . Also, the sight of Leigh Halfpenny fielding a garryowen in some space with men outside, then promptly booting it into orbit, doesn’t quite speak to a ball-in-hand gameplan.

Similarly, the strife at scrum time was only too predictable, because Vunipola is so poor in the set piece.  The medics will be working hard to get Alex Corbisiero out this week, and how they need him.  The lineout was a showcase of how muddled the thinking has got; when they’d Croft in the team last week, they threw to the front all day.  When they didn’t they went for the tail.  Confused?  You’re not the only one.

The real clanger of a performance came from Ben Youngs, who was at his arm-flapping, faffing-about worst, admittedly behind a retreating pack.  Conor Murray hugely improved the picture when he came on and is better able to control the game when on the back foot.  Are we about to see Warren Gatland go through his entire roll-call of scrum halves over the three test matches, and start Murray in the decider?  And is he about to try and rebalance his backrow once again (notwithstanding that he must replace Warburton due to injury)?  If he does, it will be symptomatic of a failure in selection, an inability to identify the form players.

The real disappointment is that in the warm-up games, the Lions at least appeared determined to play some rugby.  But any aspiration to creativity has disappeared once the test matches have begun.  It looks like the Lions have been suckered into the thinking that ‘winning’ rugby is somehow synonymous with strangling the life out of games.

It makes you despair for the future of the Lions.  We are told that this is the utmost, the pinnacle of the game, but the test matches have been, on the whole, poor to watch, and Lions have been boring.  The Aussies are in pole position to finish off the series in Sydney; they have the momentum and have shaken off their place-kicking hoodoo.   If the Lions don’t win this series, when are they going to win one?  But even worse, if they go down having barely tried to attack Australia, it would beg the question, what is the point?

Geech’s 2009 Lions won many friends because of the enterprise they showed.  They lost, but they ran one of the great teams of the professional era mighty close, were distinctly unlucky and went down swinging playing some great stuff in an era where great stuff was few and far between; 2009 was the year of the ELVs, remember.  In doing so, they put the soul back into a franchise that had suffered huge damage in 2005.  If Gatland’s team perform in Sydney as they did on Saturday, they will have undone that work. The next time we see them, they’ll be going to New Zealand.  Good luck with that one.

Watching the Liiiiiiiiiiiiiions match as Kurtley Beale lined up the sure-to-be-matchwinning penalty, it seemed the men in red were about to lose.  We’d resigned ourselves to feeling disappointment, only for  – hang on a second, what was that?  Disappointment?  This is the Lions, the pinnacle of rugby, about to have the first win of the series scratched off with the last kick, and all we could muster up was a sense of disappointment?  ‘Fraid so.

In fact when the Lions had won the match, we almost felt guilty cheering.  It was a flukey win, and the players – O’Driscoll especially, and Gatland too in fairness to him – had the good grace to look pretty sheepish in their post-match interviews.  This was ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ stuff if ever we saw it. If Ireland has accomplished the same after Owen Farrell slipped, we’d be drinking deep from the well of schadenfreude, and, without putting too fine a point on it, absolutely bloody loving it.  But we felt sorry for Beale.

Had Beale scored the winning penalty, it was not about to become a moment etched into our souls forever, like some losses, which are so awful you never quite forget them, and can recall just how you felt at the time if you remember hard enough. I’m thinking of Vincent Clerc’s try at Croke Park, after which I could barely speak for half an hour and couldn’t bear the thought of drinks in the pub; Leinster losing to the Ospreys, coughing up a historic double in the dying minutes.  Every rugby fan will have their own.

It would have been more a feeling of being sad for the players, especially the likes of Paul O’Connell and Brian O’Driscoll whose careers deserve a winning Lions series on their ‘palmeras’ when they retire.  But it was not about to be a gut-wrenching, week-ruining defeat.  But why?

At times, the Lions thing just gets a bit much.  It’s great fun, and the concept of four countries coming together for a lengthy tour is obviously a winning one, but it often feels a bit like we know it’s the pinnacle of rugby for everyone involved because… the commentators on Sky keep telling us it’s the pinnacle of rugby for everyone involved.  We know it means a lot to the players to play for the Lions, but is that not because the act of being selected is an achievement in itself, being recognised as the best player in your position across the four nations?  The specific act of playing for the Lions rarely amounts to much, as it mostly involves getting beaten.  Has such hyperbole ever been drummed up over such a bunch of serial losers?  For all the talk of the spiritual nature of the shirt and the greats that have gone before, they have mostly handed down a legacy of losing test matches.  The successful tours are eulogised ad nauseum precisely because they are so rare.  Four combined nations, bringing together about 75% of the rugby talent the northern hemisphere has to offer, and they can’t even beat a single nation.  No wonder the French sneer at us.  Well, when they’re good, at least.

The matches are generally exciting and there is something great about seeing the four nations come together and witnessing, say, Jamie Heaslip and Sam Warburton embracing at the final whistle yesterday.  But we fall just short of wetting our knickers over it in the same way Stephen Jones and Ian McGeechan – men who would have the entire rugby calendar altered to put the Lions at the centre of it – do.  There is a grain of truth when we say that the moaning about selection is more enjoyable than the games themselves.  We have written in the past about Irish fans not feeling a sense of ownership of the national team in the same way that they do of their province.  Well, who owns the Lions?  Errr… Geech? Willie John McBride?? Sky Sports???  No doubt for those following the tour, it’s easy to buy wholesale into the mega-hype, but for those a continent away on their couches, it’s hard to feel that the team represents you as a supporter.

Plus, it all gets a bit Harlem Globe-trotters – when you have the cream of Wales, Ireland, England and Scotland thrown together, the temptation is to treat the whole thing as a kind of exhibition. Instead of cursing Israel Folau for all that cash he gets, or calling Michael Hooper a cheating scumbag, or saying Berrick Barnes kicking is worse than his moustache, you find yourself being the ultimate sportsman, and enjoying the achievements of the opposition. For one, Egg kind of sort of wanted Beale’s kick to go over – for the better team would have won, for the drama of it, and for Beale himself. When Israel Folau got the ball from Ben Mowen with three men still to beat – all excellent defenders – our heart rate quickened, and not in a not-that-goon-Chris-Ashton way, but more in a visceral I-really-really-love-this-sport kind of way.

Without getting too Thinking Fans Guide to the World Cup * about it, the Lions is a bit like listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.  You know it’s fantastic and the feats on display are hugely impressive.  You’ll certainly return to it again and you enjoy listening to it.  But it doesn’t quite stir the emotions in the same way as The Stone Roses, Van Morrisson’s Astral Weeks or the third Velvet Underground album.  No, that’d be your club.  Or your province.  Or your country.

Now, where were we.  Oh yes.  Sean O’Brien has to – HAS TO – start the second test… But he won’t.

* this was a book that came out for the soccer world cup in Germany in 2006 – it was possibly the most right-on middle-class do-gooding sports book ever written. The basic message was that nationalism was so uncouth – so George W. Bush, so property boom – that it was better to support countries based on who they were. Into good wine, food, and classical music – Azzuri! Into developing world land reform issues and wearing those shawls everyone who has been to Macchu Picchu has – Bolivia! Into high tackles, boshing and paradise – Samoa! Ok, maybe not the last one, but it was eye-gouging (Argentina!) stuff.