A damp squib

If you dread an event badly enough and for long enough, (a gathering of the global extensions of the in-laws for instance) the reality, when it comes, is often far less ghastly than anticipated.

Conversely, when something as over-hyped as this Lions tour has been for so long finally hatches into real men in red shirts playing rugby, it can feel like something of a damp squib.

So it was on Saturday as the tour finally got underway in what must have been a sponsor-driven, fairly useless curtain-raiser in Hong Kong.

International cricket teams touring England used to start with a glorified net against Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk's XI at Arundel Castle. The Duchess considerately selected a gaggle of has-beens and never-will-bes intended to offer little resistance to the visitors (though they beat the 1981 Australians), money was raised for charity and lashings of Pimm's consumed. Quaint, but irrelevant.

What we learned from this weekend's Hong Kong stopover was no more telling than Kepler Wessels bowling a maiden over for Australia against the Duchess's XI in 1985.

It was hot and humid, the Barbarians concept doesn't work in the professional era, Jamie Roberts is good, Owen Farrell is a petulant brat and Joe Rokocoko is still one of the best. Nothing new there.

What we did learn is that to wag a finger at an opponent before swallow-diving in for a try is absolutely fine if you are Mike Phillips, but two wholly unnacceptable, disrespectful examples of how rugby is nose-diving into the darkest recesses of football's behavioural cesspit if your name is Armitage or Ashton. Good thing Rokocoko hasn't attended the Brian Moore school of 'chinning'.

And for all the column miles that have been written about the Lions' essential absence of national identity in favour of the ultimate team ethic, TV viewers in the UK were subjected to the normally steadfast Stuart Barnes banging on incessantly about how well Wales were doing.

Indeed they were, against scratch opponents who also took a pasting from England's second string a week earlier. The real business of the tour can't come soon enough.