CHRIS HEWETT
GUEST COLUMNIST

Old warhorse: Willie John McBride with the Lions
PICTURE: Getty Images

Willie John McBride was rarely mistaken for a happy-golucky sort, partly because of his default expression at the heart of the forward struggle - think Colin Meads, chewing a mouthful of tin foil - and partly because of a deep-rooted, granite-faced conservatism that put him on the dodgy side of the argument, followed by the wrong side of history, when it came to sporting relations with apartheid South Africa
. Yet even by his own standards, the Ulsterman’s mood has grown unusually ...