Peter Jackson: Wales have been down and laid out Down Under

The Welsh usually run into trouble in Australia, big trouble. As a sport, trying to tie the Wallaby down in his natural habitat has caused successive generations all manner of mayhem.
Wales won their only Test in the old colony more than 40 years ago before the Aussies became a real power. Since then the visitors have lost eleven in a row – five in Brisbane, five more in Sydney and the other in Melbourne.
At various stages along the way there have been threats to walk off the pitch and fly home, fights on the field and on the dance floor while the Aussies sat and stared.
It takes two to tango, a physical fact which Wales circumvented by scuffling among themselves, a sadly riotous pas de deux in the Ballymore banqueting room between the Neath faction against the non-Neath faction.
So in picking the entire Wales team responsible for retaining the Six Nations bar Dan Biggar for the summer series in Australia, the Lions can console themselves with the assumption that they ought to have the law of averages on their side.
None of those venturing south of the equator towards the end of the month to right a few historical wrongs had been born when Wales played their first series against the Wallabies in Australia. Damaging was hardly the word for what happened to one of the most revered Welsh teams of all – the 1978 Grand Slammers.
Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett gave the tour a wide berth, each having decided independently of the other to retire.    The rest all went, some viewing a four-week trip round Australia as due reward for their winter exertions.
Nobody would ever insult the Wallabies by dismissing them as a soft touch but back then Australia was considered an infinitely less demanding place to go than New Zealand or South Africa.  Regrettably for the tourists, the rot set in before a few attitudes could be adjusted.
Before they could line-up for the start of the first Test in Brisbane, Wales had threatened to jump on the next plane home in protest at what they saw as the Wallabies breaking a tour agreement on the selection of referees. They ignored Wales and picked one of their own, Bob Burnett.
Bob was so much one of their own that during Wales’ pre-Test match against Queensland, he reputedly blew up for a scrum with the words: ‘Our put-in’.

On top of that he wore a pair of maroon and white Queensland socks, a novel way of pinning one’s colours to the mast.
Some of the scenes in the ensuing Test, again refereed by Mr Burnett, might have inspired Faulty Towers.
Burnett stopped the match to tell Wales captain Terry Cobner that another Welsh player had struck him and that he was of a mind to send him off.
The player denied doing any such thing. No sooner had the dust settled on that conversation than Cobner threatened to take his entire team off the field at Ballymore in protest at the refereeing – not a good idea given that Wales were under the cosh.
They stayed put and lost 18-8. The tone had been set and it got worse in the second Test, in Sydney the following week.
Graham Price, then at the height of his long reign as the Lions’ supreme tighthead prop, had his jaw broken in two places by a punch from the Wallaby loosehead, Steve Finnane.
Wales manager Clive Rowlands ignored protocol and spoke out at the after-match buffet about ‘thuggery’. Finnane, a barrister by profession, did not blink when asked why he had hit Price.
He put down his plate long enough to utter one sentence – ‘they started it, we finished it’, or something to that effect.    When he stepped off the plane at Heathrow some 24 hours later, Price looked like a bandaged refugee from a mummifying factory.
Another player, full-back Alun Donovan, came home in a wheelchair. Other misadventures followed, losing 63-3 in Brisbane in 1991 before the try had been upgraded to five points. The Wallabies got 12 on a day made all the more shameful by what followed the match.
Before the waiters could clear away for the dancing to begin, scuffles broke out among rival factions within the Wales squad. One player was cut by broken glass during the fracas when it might be said that they showed more fight than on the pitch.
Since then Welsh defeats have narrowed until they couldn’t have got any narrower.
When Sam Warburton‘s Grand Slam team went Wallaby-hunting last year they contrived to lose all three Tests by margins of eight points, two and one.
This time, with a little help from the best of English and Irish with possibly a Scot thrown in for good measure, Warburton’s largely Welsh Lions ought to start evening up the score.