Twelve years in the making and it took all of 12 seconds for the most obvious clue as to which way this first Test was going to pan out. From the moment Tom Curry thundered into James Slipper – the only surviving Wallaby from the 2013 tour – with a bone-crunching tackle you worried for Australia.
Strip it all back – the hand wringing over the breakdown, the danger posed by Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii, the Lions’ propensity to start slowly – and this remains a simple game. If you win the collisions, then the vast majority of the time you will win the match. So it was that Andy Farrell picked the most powerful pack he could and no one typified that more than Curry.
We might have known it was coming because Curry rarely stays quiet for long. It was instructive to hear his twin brother, Ben, lash out at the “gobsmacking” criticism that has largely come about because Tom’s selection at openside meant no place for Jac Morgan, the only Welsh member of the squad. Here was a performance of ferocious intensity, a two-fingered salute to the critics, a reminder that class is permanent and a feather in the cap for Farrell, who picked the Englishman despite his tepid form on the tour previously.
These Wallabies are not good enough to compete with the Lions in this mood and nowhere was that more obvious than in the back row. For all that Curry performed like a whirling dervish, he had Tadhg Beirne, who finished as the match’s top tackler, alongside him making trademark turnovers, pinching lineouts and again justifying his selection. It was Beirne who made the turnover after Curry had rattled Slipper so soon after the opening whistle. They were some double act throughout.
Asked about the questions raised by his back-row selection, Farrell said: “I read all that, it was interesting, wasn’t it? Immense, absolutely immense, big-game players. Tom Curry put in the shot defensively and Tadhg Beirne got the turnover. It set the tone and I don’t think it stopped there.”
If Beirne was using all his street smarts, Curry was simply smashing things. He has a staggering work-rate and though he had not produced too many eye-catching moments hitherto, his performance here was littered with them.
With 16 minutes on the clock he walloped into Max Jorgensen. Two minutes later it was Fraser McReight on the receiving end. A 36th-minute try was finished from close range in typically abrasive style and just before half-time he blasted into Lynagh, tackling him in the air and conceding a penalty. He was a touch lucky to avoid a yellow card but it was further evidence of how suffocating he was for the Wallabies. A beaming grin across his face after the half-time whistle said it all – Curry was enjoying himself, a man on a mission and delivering it to a tee.
Enjoy himself he might, because it has been a trying time for Curry in the last couple of years. At the start of the season he spoke at length about the debilitating hip injury that nearly forced him into early retirement. At the time he was asked about whether he felt this Lions tour was realistic and that might as well have been a lifetime away.
He knows he will need surgery again in the future on his hip and he is carrying a wrist injury in Australia that also requires surgery but he is evidently determined to seize every moment of his career. Indeed, it is little surprise that 16 of Australia’s points came after Curry had been replaced by Ben Earl. The Wallabies never threatened a genuine comeback but their ability to get a foothold back in a match in which the Lions ought to have been out of sight says a lot about the influence of Curry in his 57 minutes on the field.
“I just thought that Tom and Tadhg Beirne, those players, as a group we know what they’re about,” said Sione Tuipultou. “In big games they perform when it counts. I thought Tom was amazing today, he’s a joy to play with. I always look at him and he always looks so sore when he’s running around, he always looks in pain but he just keeps going. Testament to him. The same with Tadhg Beirne, they’re two warriors of the game and they were a big reason why we won.”
The manner in which the Wallabies finished the game gives us something to cling to in looking for reasons to say the series is still alive but it is a straw at which to clutch. The Lions, unfussed about winning hearts and minds as long as they win Test matches, will not care and their supporters seemed happy enough as they piled back into the bars in Caxton Street, ready to paint the town red. They will be doing so in Melbourne again unless the Wallabies can do something about Beirne and Curry.
