Schmidt factor gives Australia hope as Lions arrive Down Under

Reuters

4 days ago

SYDNEY, June 25 (Reuters) - The British & Irish Lions have often set off on tour with confidence but it is rare that they arrive in the Southern Hemisphere as heavily favoured as they are to beat Australia in their test series in late July and August.
Australian rugby has been in varying stages of crisis for the last decade and the Wallabies, World Cup winners in 1991 and 1999, are currently ranked eighth in the world beneath three of the four nations that contribute to the Lions.
The band of Irish, English, Scottish and Welshmen who arrived in Perth with captain Maro Itoje and coach Andy Farrell at the weekend are therefore expected to emulate the tourists of 1989 and 2013 by triumphing Down Under.
The expectations of a one-sided series were so high last year that former England scrumhalf Ben Youngs questioned whether Australia still deserved its place in the quadrennial Lions touring cycle along with South Africa and New Zealand.
His comments came after Australia had been thumped 67-27 by Argentina in the Rugby Championship, but signs that progress was being made under wily coach Joe Schmidt came when the Wallabies beat England 42-37 at Twickenham in November.
When they followed that with a 52-20 win over Wales and got within three points of Ireland in Dublin, Australian hopes soared that the Wallabies would at least be competitive against the Lions.
Schmidt would never wittingly leave a hostage to fortune and has, at best, expressed qualified ambition for his team to be within a few points of the Lions towards the end of the tests.
"Then we're a chance," the New Zealander said in April. "But we've got to give ourselves that chance by being really good in our performance behaviours."
Many of the Lions squad are well aware of Schmidt's quality as a coach from his transformative time in charge of Ireland, when Farrell was his defence coach before becoming his successor.
Farrell was also assistant to Warren Gatland on the 2013 tour to Australia and the 2017 tour of New Zealand, when the test series was drawn 1-1, so is more than familiar with the challenges facing a Lions coach.
The former rugby league international has just a few weeks to forge players more used to knocking seven bells out of each other into a cohesive unit ready to play three matches at the highest level of the game.
The tour games, although far fewer than in the days when the Lions tramped around small provincial towns for three months or more, are key to that process.
Farrell got the ball rolling with less than a full squad against Argentina in Dublin last weekend and received the wake up call of a 28-24 defeat that swiftly ended his hopes that they would go through the 10-match tour undefeated.
"That's all part of the journey – to understand where we need to go next," the Englishman said on his arrival in Perth.
"We're here to build for what's going to be a fantastic test series. We want to play some good rugby along the way and we'll find out more about each other."
The Lions are unlikely to play a team as good as the Pumas until the first test in Brisbane on July 19 with four matches against Super Rugby teams and one against an Australia-New Zealand XV before that.
Farrell gets his second chance to put a team out on the park on Saturday at Perth Stadium against Western Force, a gritty team but the weakest of the four Australian Super Rugby sides.
Lions chief executive Ben Calveley has already fired a shot across the bows of Rugby Australia, insisting that Wallabies players should be released for tour games for fear that they will otherwise be uncompetitive.
Western Australia, and the Force since 2006, have never provided that stiff of an opposition, losing 44-0 to the Lions in 1989, 116-10 in 2001 and 69-17 in 2013.
The match will, though, give Australia a first glimpse of the army of up to 40,000 red-shirted British and Irish rugby enthusiasts who will descend on the country to cheer on the Lions.