When the scores are tied, there is 50 seconds left on the clock and you need someone who is going to step up and take that drop goal, then Andy Farrell was your man. And when the series is all square with one game left to play and you need someone to give the big speech that is exactly what everyone needs to hear in the last hours before the match, you will not find many better. He may very well turn out to be exactly who you need to lead a group of the 38 best players from Britain and Ireland through a six-week tour of Australia, too.
Whether any of this means Farrell is someone you want to pay to see play the O2 Arena is another matter. But here he was under the bright lights regardless, sandwiched between Usher and Olly Murs in the (un)coveted Thursday 3pm slot at the Indigo Lounge, front and centre of the British & Irish Lions’ first live squad announcement show.
“So what makes the Lions so special, Andy?” asked the presenter, Lee McKenzie. “Well,” Farrell replied under his breath, “it’s impossible to put into words.” After four years of waiting, the final 30 minutes started to feel painfully long.
Rugby is not very good at razzmatazz. Three months back, Formula One made a runaway success of using this same venue for its season launch, but then, with the best will in the world, they were offering the attenders a little more than the chance to listen to the Ireland scrum coach, John Fogarty, make small talk with Ugo Monye or offer a round of applause to Gavin Hastings, who was sitting in a box somewhere up in the gods. At one point, McKenzie asked Monye what he remembered about the day, in 2009, he found out he had been selected.
“The hardest thing about it was waiting, so shall we just get on with it?” Monye said, which got a loud round of applause. He always did have a good eye for an opening.
Not that it is such a bad idea to turn the British & Irish Lions squad announcement into a live event. The squad selection is, after all, the most distinctive thing about the team, their USP, as the corporate sorts who run the sport say. It is that the Lions had decided they needed to charge people to come along and watch it that felt all wrong. Tickets went on sale for £60, were then reduced to £35 and, in the very end, were being given away first come, first served. Even then, there were plenty of empty seats. No one I spoke to who had paid for their place had been offered a refund.
Whatever the Lions are supposed to be about (and there was, as there always is, an awful lot of talk about their values) it is not money. It surely would have been a better idea to give the tickets to players, coaches and administrators who volunteer to help run clubs or people who missed out on going to the 2021 tour to South Africa at the last minute because of the travel restrictions during the pandemic. Or even to distribute them to the rugby-playing schools in the neighbourhood instead of using it as an opportunity to gouge an extra few thousand pounds out of the fans.
The few hundred who had made their way along looked a little lost inside the shopping mall that surrounds the venue. Most decided, in the tradition of these things, that, in doubt, the best thing to do was get along to the bar for a couple of jars and there was a rush on in the All Bar One in the lobby.
They were all wearing red Lions jerseys of one vintage or another and swapping stories about the tours they had been on together. People love this team and, given what they pay to follow them, they deserve better than being charged 50 quid to provide room meat for a live stream of a squad-naming.
There was even a man out in the crowd telling everyone when it was time to clap. When Maro Itoje walked in they did not need any prompting, but got to their feet and started whooping and hollering. A couple of burly, bald blokes at the back started celebrating as if they had just won the call-up themselves. Because there is, still, a beautiful idea at the heart of all this. The Lions are unlike anything else in all sport, you just wish it was not getting harder and harder to find it, buried there somewhere underneath all the nonsense.
