Thrill of the Lions falling victim to the money game

In 2009, a peculiar television advert was broadcast promoting the tournament which was then the holy grail of club rugby.

It featured a suave, vaguely banker-ish looking older gentleman walking around the gloomy and ghostly vestige of a deserted rugby ground late at night with a television film crew. A caption informed the audience that it had been transported to exalted country: the year was 2028 and the group was standing on “the site of the original Heineken Cup”. The senior man claimed, somewhat improbably, that he had been groundskeeper at the now-ruined stadium for some thirty years.

“You must have some great memories of the Heineken Cup,” prompted the interviewer: apparently in 2028, the journalistic reliance on the leading question is alive and well.

“Ahh yes,” the apparent groundskeeper purred. “I saw some great battles here.”

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In a way, the competition got to the heart of two of Ireland's chief Celtic Tiger enthusiasms: weekend boozing and rugby

Bear in mind that this was around the peak of Heineken Cup fever in Ireland, if not Europe in general. Munster had won the competition in 2008 and Leinster succeeded them, beating the reigning champions in Croke Park in what was a world record attendance for the club game. Yet here was this advertisement portraying the tournament has something long-ended and ruined.

What were we to suppose had happened? Had there been some kind of global catastrophe? Were Hook and McGurk okay? So there would be no Heino in the future? Is that what this advert was telling us? How could that be? And if so, what the hell was the Red Army of Munster supposed to do with their Saturday afternoons between January and May? It was only forty seconds but the advert produced a litany of troubling questions.

Ghostly re-enactment

The fictive “shoot” was troubled by a phantom rugby game in the background: the light is murky so it’s hard to identify what’s going on – maybe a ghostly re-enactment of Neil Back illegally handling the ball in that scrum in the Munster-Leicester final of 2002. “It’s as if the place remembers,” said the groundsman, turning spooky all of a sudden. “So many great memories here . . .”

Ah, memories. What the creatives at Heineken were, of course, attempting to do was to add a veneer of Ye Old History to a competition that was still spanking new and shiny and very much about the cha-ching. The Heineken Cup began with little fanfare in 1995: the first game featured Toulouse roundly thrashing Romanian outfit Farul Constanta and teams from Scotland or England did not participate.

The growth of the competition over the next decade remains one of the great triumphs of modern sports marketing and happened to be a good idea that worked. With rugby just beginning to get its act together as a television spectacle, it quickly became clear that there was a huge appetite for the novelty of seeing the hotbeds of provincial French rugby clashing with the Celtic and English clubs. The roaring success of Ryanair made travel to these (relatively) accessible locations convenient for fans.

The inclusion of Ireland’s four provincial teams helped to embed that system as the IRFU began to get to grips with professionalism. It is hard to calculate just how important the enthusiasm of the Irish provinces and its followers for European rugby was to the evolution of the competition.

Munster, in particular, always alive to its own sense of tradition and international reputation, chased after the cup with something close to an obsession. They were involved in so many great games and wore their hearts on their sleeves that it was easy to forget the fact that there was a cold commerce at play at the heart of the Heineken Cup. You only had to look at is name: the most nakedly-commercial inspired cup name in sports history.

Bit sniffy

At its peak, it became known as “the Heino”. In a way, the competition got to the heart of two of Ireland’s chief Celtic Tiger enthusiasms: weekend boozing and rugby. But there was always a nagging sense that the French would as soon have retreated to their localised pitches to hate on each other and the English were a bit sniffy about the whole show also.

As it was, that odd little advert served as a premonition. The Heino duly fell apart: the French and English opted out and although the European Cup has returned, it doesn’t have quite the grip on the imagination that it had in those years.

The story of the Lions tours is the inverse of the Heineken Cup. The four-year tour is a century-thick boy’s own annual of extraordinary journeys, lifelong friendships, romanticised violence, electrifying scores and stories that have travelled through the decades. Players on each touring team are acutely aware that they have made it to a kind of dreamland: they are part of the only team that transcends the honour of winning an international cap and embarking on a tour that trades on the appeal of a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

As Warren Gatland remarked recently, much of his time in the months before this tour eaten up attending to sponsors' demands

Brian Moore, the former England prop, recalls in his biography the moment he was handed his prized Lions blazer when he made the touring squad for South Africa in 1989. It didn’t fit.

“The arms of my blazer were more suited to those of an orangutan. Other players’ trousers either came halfway up shins or fell well over the bottoms of their feet. I do not know how a succession of clothing sponsors achieved this feat, but it became a standing joke.”

It didn’t matter: the shortcomings and imperfections and the need to improvise was part of the culture of the tour. In 1971, during the infamous Lions-Canterbury game, the tourists had no team doctor to cope with a dressing room that looked like an A&E unit. They got on with it. In 1989, Moore’s understanding of what the Lions was based on imagination and reports because “so few games were captured on film.”

By 1997, 180 hours of film was taken for the celebrated Living With The Lions documentary which brought what had been the stuff of anecdote into living rooms. Twenty years on, the idea of that kind of access is laughable. The Lions' time is micro-managed.

Serious revenue

As Warren Gatland remarked recently, much of his time in the months before this tour eaten up attending to sponsors' demands. The show generates serious revenue now. The tour of Australia four years ago generated an estimated £40 million profit for the host nation. This year’s barnstorming tour of New Zealand is bound to yield even greater profits.

Sam Warburton’s team are bidding to become only the second ever Lions team to win a Test series in New Zealand. There have been complaints long before Saturday’s kick-off in Whangerai that the gruelling schedule makes that task all but impossible. But time is the most precious commodity in contemporary rugby. The clubs want their stars back earlier and earlier: the hosts want to compress the tour into the shortest time possible.

At the heart of the appeal of the Lions tour is the fact that it’s a madly impractical idea. Throw a bunch of Scots, English, Welsh and Irish lads on a plane and have them land somewhere far away and hostile and watch them become a team. And how come the Welsh get the jersey anyhow? It’s still a thrill and the Test series will be fascinating – if there are still enough healthy Lions to field for Warren Gatland to select his ideal team.

But the shiny commercial power of the event is now threatening to civilise and corporatize the pure strangeness of the Lions phenomenon. The custodians of rugby need to be wary. The commercial imperatives of a sport can’t concoct history and tradition but can easily wipe it out.