James Horwill: My Wallabies won’t be punchbags

Australia captain James Horwill issued the Lions a fighting challenge last night, warning that the Wallabies will match them blow for blow.
“We are not going to be punchbags for them,” he said.  “We are going to match them physically and push them as far as we can. We are not going to take a backward step on anything.”
With the Lions en route from Hong Kong to Perth, their arrival in Australia for the real business of the tour coincided with Horwill giving them a sharp reminder of what it will take to win the Test series, something no Lions team has done for 16 years.
“They seem to grow an extra arm and leg when they play under the Lions crest but let me get this straight – they are not the only ones who are passionate about the jersey they are playing for,” Horwill said in a column appearing in an Australian newspaper today.  “I know our guys play with a lot of passion for their country. They will not be out-willed. As we have seen in every Lions tour in history, the opening moments of the opening Test will be no place for the faint-hearted.
“The Lions will look to impose themselves. That is something we are not only going to have to deal with but we want to be able to put it back on them.”
Horwill, at 28 a second row veteran of 77 Tests, will remember the scraps when the Lions were last in Australia but was too young to remember the infamous Battle of Ballymore, the second Test of the 1989 tour after the Lions had lost the first in Sydney 30-12.
Bob Dwyer, then Australia’s coach, said: ‘We toweled them up in the first Test and they  put on a pre-organised fight to see if we could fight as well as we played footy.”
David Campese says:  “The Lions took us on physically, mostly in illegal ways.”
Wallaby full-back Kurtley Beale played his first match yesterday for ten weeks after completing the initial stage of alcohol rehab.
Beale went the full distance for Randwick against Sydney University and joined the Wallabies at their Sydney training camp yesterday.
PETER JACKSON