"Any doubts as to whether the Lions would survive into the professional era were firmly quelled by the successful visit to South Africa in 1997" Huw Richards writes

Anyone who wondered whether the Lions still matter to modern players should have been at the press conference earlier this year when Lawrence Dallaglio announced his retirement. He was asked what he considered to be the highlight of his career.

Few players can ever have had more choice in answering such a question. Would it be winning a World Cup, captaining his country, winning a couple of Heinekens or perhaps that World Sevens victory right back at the beginning of his career?

But no, it was none of these - but playing for the Lions on the three tours, although the last all too briefly, that he was privileged to make. And while the answer came back immediately it was hardly unconsidered - Dallaglio is so proud of his connection with the Lions that he collects books and other memorabilia about them.

The squad that goes to South Africa next year will be, on most counts, the 28th Lions team. If that seems a touch equivocal, there is a reason.

The first eight teams, before the First World War, were essentially private affairs. It was only in 1924 that the four Home Unions formally took charge and the official succession began.

They will be the 13th to go to South Africa, where those early semi-official teams have a particularly important role in rugby history. South Africa had no natural nearby opponent - they did not play New Zealand until 1921 - so British touring teams provided all their early international history. South Africa's first test in 1891, its first victory in 1896 and adoption of the famous green shirts in 1903 were all against Britain teams.

Those early ventures were colourful and often hazardous. The 1888 visitors to New Zealand and Australia, generally regarded as the first in the procession, lost skipper Bob Seddon drowned in an Australian river and were widely suspected, almost certainly with some justice since they were an essentially commercial operation promoted by Nottingham cricket legends Alfred Shaw and Arthur Shrewsbury, of professionalism.

The 1896 team to South Africa contained two Irishmen, Tom Crean and Robert Johnston, who would return in a different imperial uniform three years later to fight in the Boer War, in which both won Victoria Crosses. Crean was an early exemplar of Irish rumbustiousness on and off the field and evidently took the tour seriously, suggesting that players limit themselves to four tumblers of champagne each day.

The Anglo-Welsh team who went to New Zealand in 1908 were a distinctly gentlemanly lot sent to convince the kiwis of the virtues of the eight-man scrum and of pure amateurism and failed miserably on both counts - getting hammered in the tests by the All Blacks, with their seven man plus rover system, and having Leicester prop Fred Jackson exposed as a former rugby league player. Sent home, Jackson took fiendish revenge by returning to New Zealand and fathering an All Black prop.

But then relations with New Zealand often were contentious. The manager of the 1930 Lions, James Baxter, was an authentic gunboat diplomat, condemning the All Black 'rover' as 'nothing more or less than a cheat' and explaining the popularity of rugby league in Auckland by saying 'every city needs its sewer'.

By then Lions teams were official, but they were not always representative. While theoretically showing off the best of British rugby they were, and would for much of the century remain, for practical purposes a selection only of the best who could afford several months away from work unpaid. Nor was organisation necessarily of the best. Wales winger Rowe Harding recalled that the 1924 team to South Africa met for the first time when it boarded the boat at Southampton, suffered 'from a lack of good reserves and never got together as a team'.

It is far from certain that full-strength Lions teams would have won. They were after all playing away, and both the All Blacks and Springboks consistently won test matches when they visited Britain and Ireland. But being consistently below strength did not help.

What the Lions did succeed in doing in the 1950s, when the modern pattern of a tour more or less every four years replaced the intermittency of the interwar period, was establishing a reputation for brilliant rugby. The 1950 and 1959 teams lost in New Zealand but left vivid memories of great play by players like Ken Jones and Jack Kyle in 1950, Peter Jackson and Bev Risman in 1959.

In between came one of the most important of all Lions team - the 1955 visitors to South Africa. They managed to draw the series after winning the first test in front of a world record 95,000 crowd, Bok full-back Jackie van der Schyff's headhanging misery after missing a potentially match-winning kick one of the most vivid images we have of sporting dejection. Cliff Morgan, Jeff Butterfield and teenage prodigy Tony O'Reilly played some of the most breathtaking rugby yet seen.

O'Reilly epitomised another Lions trademark - the marked propensity of the best Irish players to play their very best rugby on tours. Willie John McBride, the giant Ulsterman who would uniquely go on five tours and play 17 tests between 1962 and 1974, was another.

He endured to play in one of the greatest Lions teams - the 1971 visitors to New Zealand, built around Wales's greatest generation and coached brilliantly by Carwyn James, who broke with that pattern of failure - and to captain another, the 1974 team who devastated South Africa, missing a 100 per cent record only on the basis of some home town refereeing in the final test.

It came as a shock when the old pattern of losses was resumed in New Zealand in 1977 and held for much of the rest of the pre-professional era - the first tour dedicated to Australia in 1989 apart, when Robert Jones's passing released Rob Andrew from his previous self-doubt at international level, David Campese's worst moment in 101 tests presented Ieuan Evans with the decisive score and the Lions came from behind. That was the first team coached by Ian McGeechan, who has become to Lions coaching what McBride was to playing.

Any doubts as to whether the Lions would survive into the professional era were firmly quelled by the successful visit to world champions South Africa in 1997 - the first of the two teams led by Martin Johnson, remembered for Scott Gibbs' flattening of Os du Randt, Jeremy Guscott's decisive drop-goal and the revelation of Keith Wood's extraordinary vocabulary in a post-tour documentary.

The two tours since, particularly New Zealand in 2005, have shown up the challenges confronting a modern Lions team - the mismatch between larger squads and the smaller number of matches and the difficulty of fitting players increasingly formed by distinct national squad cultures into a common pattern. Scheduling, as the late arrival of key players in 2005 and near-certainty that it will happen again next year shows, is ever more problematic.

It remains, though, a unique, highly-prized experience for players and fans alike, with its ventures off the beaten track the last remnant of traditional touring in a world where visiting national teams normally now only play test matches. Fans have travelled in greater numbers than before - most conspicuously to Australia in 2001, where the first test at Brisbane felt like a home game. The income they bring in explains why the three Sanzar unions continue among the Lions' greatest fans. For British and Irish players it remains the game's greatest honour outside - or perhaps equal with, if Dallaglio is any guide - winning the World Cup. As Irish writer Paul Daly put it in the title of his book on the 2005 trip to New Zealand, it is the Last Great Tour.