- The Observer,
- Sunday July 8 2001
Jeff Probyn's mobile goes off in the strangest places. As a former international, he moves about the rugby universe with practised ease, a guest at dinners, media pundit, a facilitator of regular rugby beanos, that sort of thing.
The game, after all, remains rooted to its heritage of having a good time, and the boy from Bethnal Green knows how to do that as well as anyone.
But the airport lounge in Port Douglas, on Queensland's Great Barrier Reef, is one of the last places you would expect Probyn to be picking up his phone last Thursday night. Indeed, given his controversial antipathy towards the whole concept of British and Irish Lions tours, discovering he was within a few minutes of boarding the overnight plane for Melbourne to watch yesterday's second Test came as a major surprise.
'Don't get me wrong,' he said. 'This has been a fantastic tour and they did wonderfully well to win the first Test.' You could hear the 'but' coming.
'But I stand by what I said three years ago: there are many more important games than those played by the Lions. The World Cup, for instance. Can you imagine if England were to win the next World Cup? You would have thousands of new young players interested in the game, as well as a lot of new sponsorship and endorsements.
'For me, the development of England rugby is still the priority. And you are sacrificing that development with these tours. They get in the way and we don't gain financially from them.'
What Probyn suggested to the Rugby Football Union three years ago was to cut the tours from every four years to six. Or, sacrilege of all sacrileges, to abandon them altogether. It was a motion given tacit support by, of all people, the former Lions captain Bill Beaumont, who was chairman of the playing committee.
Probyn said he was speaking for the silent majority of RFU members - but the motion failed. Probyn, who played 37 times for England and controversially was omitted from the 1993 Lions tour, says his only motivation is to see England prosper.
He always was a difficult sod, the tough tight-head prop from London's East End. He saw his insurrection as one way of hitting back at the game's 'Old Farts', who'd rightly been identified by Will Carling as the cause of many of rugby's woes.
He might have been misguided in directing his frustration at one of the most cherished events in all of sport, but he figured he was picking up on the mood of the time. And, as when he was propping for England, he refuses to budge.
'The Lions are anathema,' he says - or was it 'anachronism'? Dodgy line to Port Douglas. He'd probably settle for either.
'From the English point of view they contribute nothing. England lose their best players to the tour and the national team is not helped one bit. On the England tour of Canada young players were coming through but, when the Lions go home, those older, established players will still be in place.
'My protest is irrelevant in a way, because the TV contracts are in place for the next 10 years. But what we need from these tours is a more equitable distribution of funds between the host country and the Lions. As it is, the Lions get a pittance. And anything that interferes with the preparation for the World Cup cannot be good for the game.
'These games don't really mean anything. People go on about great Lions tours - and they have had a few amazing results - but they've lost far more than they've won down the years.'
Statistically, he's right. But that's hardly the point. The Lions tradition, which began 113 years ago, is cherished universally, by those lucky enough to win a place and their three opponents, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as the epitome of the grand struggle.
Sport is about dreaming. Those dreams against impossible odds have been realised intermittently, which serves to heighten their significance. Besides, the Lions, once an all-star pick-up team, are gelling into a formidable unit in the new age of professionalism, one that attracts the sort of commercial interest that Probyn sees as so central to the exercise.
What most people want is attractive rugby, heroic performances and wins to lift the spirit. The Lions beat all injuries and intimidation to conquer South Africa 2-1 four years ago and this squad have overcome unsophisticated off-field sledging as well as their own internal tensions to produce one of the memorable Lions victories in Brisbane.
It has all been gripping entertainment, innocently and heart-warmingly binding a nation. Probyn's biggest crime is to deny that romance and history count for anything in sport any more.
Maybe he wasn't touched by them. Most of us have been, one small way or another. And history, especially, has a funny way of coming to life in the strangest ways.
Take the first Lions tour, Down Under in the winter of 1888. The venture was the brainchild of Alfred Shaw and Arthur Shrewsbury, who were in Australia with the England cricket team. The RFU refused to sanction the tour, fearing professionalism.
Thus the freewheeling nature of the Lions was established and they played their rugby all over the colonies - as well as 18 games of Australian rules. At one point, they landed up in Maitland, NSW, a thriving coal and market town in the Hunter Valley. The Lions captain, a dashing young Englishman called Bob Seddon, never left Maitland, drowning in the treacherous waters of the Hunter River while out sculling.
I only found that out last week, re-reading Clem Thomas's History of the British Lions. It explains now why, when I was playing rugby in Maitland 30-odd years ago, one club member regularly visited a local cemetery to place flowers on the headstone of someone he only ever described as, 'some Pommy bastard who used to play for the Lions'.
Sorry, Jeff. You're wrong. And you always will be.
