Anyone for cricket, or snooker, or cards, or golf? Lions tours – even in defeat – are meant to be vibrant, fun and the pinnacle of your career and, perhaps, even life, but the 1977 tour was anything but. Sir Ian McGeechan once summed up the 1977 tour as “grim, doomed and an endless slog; it was interminable, not enjoyable in the slightest”.
When Bill Beaumont flew out as a replacement for Nigel Horton who had broken a thumb, the story goes that Willie Duggan took it on himself to go to the airport and greet the eager young Englishman.
“If I was you Bill I would...