Argentina have reached the semi-finals of the Rugby World Cup. England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales have not. This can mean only one thing. The British and Irish Lions should tour the Americas.
Yes, granted, in the real world Argentina’s success can and does mean much more than that one thing. And, quite obviously, there is less chance of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa agreeing to a Lions windfall once in 16 years instead of once in 12 than there is of Chris Robshaw ever lifting the Webb Ellis Cup or being a genuine Test No7. But this is not the real world. This is where I dream.
It’s not as if these Pumas do not deserve the recognition. Traditionally enormous and frightening in the tight five, they are brilliant in a back row formed round Juan Martín Fernández Lobbe, scintillating through Juan Imhoff, Joaquín Tuculet and Santiago Cordero out wide. Bajada mixed with ballet, if you will or I really must. And I must – these Pumas are superb.
Their success has been growing. In August they beat South Africa in Durban, a feat beyond the Lions of 2009. Now they have beaten Ireland, the double Six Nations champions, in a World Cup quarter-final. A semi-final win over Australia, themselves beaten in Mendoza last October, is not remotely out of the question.
Were that to be achieved, victory over the Springboks in the World Cup final would, evidently, be entirely possible. And should New Zealand make the final instead, the two teams’ game in Pool C suggests a win over the All Blacks would be possible too.
At Wembley, if Daniel Hourcade’s team had believed a little more, they could have beaten McCaw, Carter and co. Now they have burgeoning belief and brilliant unity, forged in the heat of knockout rugby.
This Argentina team could become world champions.
Consider that for a moment. Argentina, long an amateur backwater, an exporter of punchy front rowers like Freddy Mendez and locks like German Llanes, a man so big they named a nationality after him. Los Pumas, good for the odd shock, rarely pushed around, mostly bravely beaten. Now potential world champions.
It’s no joke, and Argentinian rugby, guided like backs and packs of old by Agustín Pichot, is not joking about its development. The UAR is bringing its leading players home to play for pay in Super Rugby from 2016. In that hothouse, these and future Pumas will develop as attacking rugby talents far quicker than their factory raised, bosh-braised British and Irish equivalents.
A Lions tour, we are constantly told, is the “ultimate test”. Well, Argentinian rugby is becoming an ultimately testing proposition.
Of course, Argentina could most obviously host only five Lions games: three Tests, the Super Rugby franchise and the Jaguars, aka Argentina A. But you can also throw in the fascinating Pampas XV, effectively the national third team. And there you have six games – one of which can be in Puerto Madryn in Patagonia, to make the Welsh boys feel at home. That’s almost two thirds of a modern Lions tour.
Which is where the Americas, plural, come in. The Lions recently considered a bid from USA Rugby to host a warm-up Test in 2017, as the tourists make their way to New Zealand for a ritual hammering. It’s not going to happen. (The game, not the hammering. That’s safe.) Player availability. The demands of the big European clubs were sure to be too great. Curses.
But if North American rugby is going to develop at anything close to the rate of rugby in South America, it will need a lot of help. So let’s say the Lions go west instead of south in 2021, after a second turn of the professional merry-go-round that began in South Africa in 1997. Their first stop must be in the United States.
Make it two games: the Barbarians or a World XV, or whatever that year’s Toulon front five want to call themselves for summer boot money. Put that one on the east coast. New York. Then the US Eagles on the west coast. San Francisco. Big money, big stadiums, big lads in opposition. Big fun.
Then there’s Canada. Like the Eagles, their World Cup showed they can only benefit from exposure at the highest level, which can only benefit from exposure to them. So that’s a Lions Test in Vancouver, for nine games. Presuming, of course, the Lions aren’t put off by having lost there in 1966.
Of course this whole dream, should it somehow stagger into reality, would also depend on the Lions’ blazers not being frightened off by another past embarrassment, the 25-25 draw with Argentina in Cardiff in 2005. Let’s be optimistic and say that experience – and the tantalising “lost“ Lions tours to Argentina, of 1910, 1927 and 1936 – inspires only a wish to go one better. Naive, I know, I know.
But while I’m dreaming, throw in a stop in Uruguay. Los Teros also performed above themselves in England, but like the US and Canada only more so, they will now disappear until whensoever they next qualify for a World Cup. If you play them, they will come on in leaps and bounds. And there’s your 10-game tour.
And after the preamble down through the Americas, the 2021 Lions will be down to business: six games in Argentina, building in intensity to a final Test in Buenos Aires. You know how it would look: 65,000 fans bouncing and singing in the River Plate Stadium, the kind of boiling atmosphere and fired-up home team that frightened the bejesus out of the All Blacks – Richie McCaw included – as long ago as 2001.
The result? Rugby revitalised in the Americas, the Lions refreshed by a trip to parts no others have reached. And, on current evidence, los Pumas gloriously victorious.
Of course, this is just an idle fantasy: it hasn’t been costed out, fine-tuned for TV or maximised for multinational profit. But world rugby must learn to speak Spanish.
Vamos Leones.
British and Irish Lions to the Americas, 2021: a ludicrously optimistic itinerary
Barbarians (New York)
USA (San Francisco)
Canada (Vancouver)
Uruguay (Montevideo)
Pampas XV (Rosario)
Jaguars (Puerto Madryn)
Argentina (Salta)
Super Rugby Franchise (Buenos Aires)
Argentina (Mendoza)
Argentina (Buenos Aires)
