Lawrence Dallaglio Rewatches The Brutal 1997 Lions Tour To South Africa | Rugby Union | RugbyPass

people often are her. I'm sure you get the same thing from looking back on your career, what the best moment of your career was and you know naturally people expect you to say Rugby World Cup which was amazing obviously because you can't play in many and the chance to win one is fantastic, but actually, in terms of experience, the best experience of my Barnard life was the

1997

Lions

tour

to South Africa, where Martin Johnson, the British Isles captain, was a great moment for him too, as he leads. in his first Test match it would be completed, it was an odyssey, it really was a journey that started at the Outlands Hotel in Weybridge when in reality it started long before that with the letters coming in, you know, will you make it work?

It was the team selection, the meeting, we had a week together bonding, if that's the best way to describe it, and then obviously eight weeks on the road against the entire nation, so you know I was lucky. Unlike you, I didn't grow up. I grew up in a traditional

rugby

environment but I had a lot of friends who taught me about the Lions and I always read about the British and Irish Lions because I think it's important to understand what you are about. Coming in, a friend of mine in Fulham has a second-hand bookstore and he called me and said, I've got all these books about these big lion runs, you know, and they're there for you to pick up and read and I read about Carwyn James. , I read about the great Willie John McBride on the

tour

to South Africa in '74, about some of the times when things weren't going so well, so I felt like I knew a lot about the environment I was in. but even that couldn't prepare me for how special he really is, maybe I did get into it because there was a bit of talk about his speech of all speeches, possibly I don't think there has ever been a great speech in

rugby

, but it certainly hasn't been demonstrated in the way that Jim Telfer did it, that there really were two speeches and they should not be separate in the sense that Jim Telfer obviously, as we all know, knows that. part of the preparation for a rugby match when the forwards meet probably a little bit earlier and we have our own separate forwards meeting so that was every Jim Telfer speech and that was the forward about 10 to 10. more or less for the words that were going to come out and face the Lions and I think you know, look, you know, Jim had obviously thought a lot about what he was going to say, you know, he himself talked about his experience as a teacher and you.

I know how to use wordplay, use silence as a way to make it even more emotionally dramatic, but personally I've always been a firm believer in the emotional side of play. You know that most sides are very evenly matched technically. Tactically, everyone trains very hard, everyone does their video analysis, so ultimately when you have two very evenly matched teams, what's the difference between the winners and the losers? Well, for me, if you can find the right emotional hook that everyone can latch on to, then it becomes a very powerful tool and it doesn't really matter who is in the locker room next to you.

You know, if you find that hook, they have no chance of winning and that's exactly what Jim Telford did with his speech. You know, and it was in many ways, it was very personal for Jim, it was almost a metaphor for his own life, frankly, the game didn't start while he didn't dive to run off the back of her in a lineout, of course, it was because that's what South Africa does. They are famous for a scrum set piece, what are the emotions like after those tries? A couple of things that I remember that come to mind when you say the odds that Durant tries, yeah, I certainly felt the full force of that because I was defending how he slid around the corner, well, it was a pure weight of physics.

There was no way Mohini was going to stop someone that size, you know, a couple of meters from the line and challenge anyone. Wow, you know, I knew it was going to be hard. I don't really know if it was going to be that difficult, but the other thing is that the set piece if you look at the first scrum of the game is so big, that's why we've done these training sessions with more of, you know, infamous sessions. . with over a hundred scrums they didn't rate a scrum and they caught us very high in the first scrum and they pushed us back and you know there was a lot of controversy around the selection of maybe Tom Smith and Paul Wallace and a lot of people say, well, you know what chance do we have, but actually that was probably one of the few scrums in the game where we went back and we know we managed to put things right after the physicality of South Africa is something that is Still, clearly we have known for a long time time, probably since the game started, but it's a pretty interesting moment in that match where you decided to get on the wrong side, slow the ball down and then took an absolute display I think.

Was it Mark Andrews? How physical were the South Africans there? No, the game changed me. There were some epic battles not only for the Lions but for any type of team that took down there, but that was a pretty electronic burn. Yeah, I mean, I went for the first time. to South Africa in 1994 and I think I realized very clearly that football had been professional for much longer in South Africa than it possibly had been in England and just the physical size of the players who were even at the back today I know there's a more even distribution in terms of people who have caught up, but in those days he went there and just looked at Sapphic while thinking, oh my God, I mean, they're just big guys, big men, no. just big as in tall, you know, but big, you know, huge, huge, physically intimidating, physically terrifying people, and you know, I think we'll know very quickly, from a young age, that if you want to have any chance of beating anyone South African team, but particularly the Springboks, you have to at least match them physically, you know and I don't want to be cruel, but I compare it to the school bully, you know, on the playground and then the school bully shows up. school, you know, you have a choice.

You either get beat up or you confront him and that figure is very similar to that, they will run at you and you ran at them very hard and if that doesn't work they will run at you again and there I was. I'm very tough and if that doesn't work, you'll get run over. You know, there wasn't necessarily as much flexibility in the way they played because they didn't have to be, they just bullied in their own way. There has always been a bit of that mentality in South Africans. I don't know if it's the Dutch mentality.

I'm not really sure where it comes from, but it's definitely there and most of the time they are intimidating in their own way. to victory, so I think what we would decide to do as a group of lines is to say that we are going to resist that physical exam at school that didn't work from the first rolling line, but we are going to face you and we are not going to be bullied and I think that As the game goes on those matchups become very clear, so you mentioned going to halftime and one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about that a lot of people are very interested in, especially the fact that you won the Cup. of the World, as well as the leadership of the team, so looking back at that team and then the guys that I chose, but I thought they would potentially be the main speakers in and around them.

See the added sounds that at 10 Keith would make and hook John, obviously you were the captain yourself so when you come on at half-time and who the big talkers in the locker room are, well I think you know you're not far off. it's there and because you've been in a lot of locker rooms, but I mean it's quite funny, the intensity of that Test match, particularly for the first forty minutes, was so high, it was so crazy that there wasn't really much talked about. in the first two or three minutes of halftime because you were sucking in oxygen, it's literally funny, isn't it when you're watching a game and you don't realize how fatigued the players are?

Like a big essay on what needs to change normally, mindset is just two or three points, remember them and if you remember them, take them to the second or if you've done very, very well, so I don't think there are too many. a lot of voices there, I think they were the ones you know, can Jim say the whole words? And there Martin Johnson, as captain, was saying a few words, you know, Keith, I could intervene myself after that, but there's not much that needs to be done. he said quite frankly and I think we knew we had a hell of a lot of forty minutes ahead of us, so a guy who had a couple of really big hits in the three tests with Scott Gibbs, but a big slamming entry actually in that first test. but Arizona's best, Simon Stern, attacks the basket here on the court.

Remember that's all I can remember with Scott Gibbs, who was good at it and Oscar ran. You mentioned the laws of physics after that trial. How influential he was on that tour because you talk about physicality. and I think that was the difference why you went there in that test series because you would match them well physically. I think what was really interesting was that the EEMA geek had obviously selected that team in a very different way. maybe to previous Lions tours and that was most evident by the selection of maybe some, some actually say wild cards and a lot of them came from rugby league.

Now Scott Gibbs had obviously been raised on rugby, but more recently he had been playing rugby. league along with the likes of John Bentley who was drafted Allen Bateman Craig quenelle Allen Tate and no doubt these guys had been professional due to their much longer rugby league journey than us and their contribution to our preparation was huge, but I would talk about a couple of important moments in the game Matt Dorsey tried this debut until Townsend's time, a dropkick with the last minute of the game Dawson, who is a good guy, come after Santa, look at Tommy, can he escape ?

Missy can, she's a brilliant drag. It was almost the point where you knew the game was potentially one where I picked a couple of moments because I knew you were going to ask this question and I'll move on to Dorsen's attempt, which was magical in itself, but right before. I think it was South Africa who were leading at half time, they were leading by 1612 and often that's a big indicator of who will go on and win the game and I don't know if it was just before half time or just after half time that they scored. one try was a Russell Bennett try that was disallowed and it was disallowed because there was no DMO in those days Colin Hawke, the all black New Zealand referee, disallowed the try for a forward pass marginal and I mean marginal now at sixteen twelve if that I tried stand up and I became, you know, you'd like to think South Africa was home and home, so for me that try that they didn't allow you was a real turning point in the game and it allowed us to stay in it and then we got to a scrum . the right side of the pitch and as I mentioned before, the first scrum of the game was a total disaster and yet this scrum, you know, I mean, you can't, you can't avoid or take away from Matt Dawson's individual brilliance there.

You know what he did to score that try, but I'm sure he'd admit that, you know, it was just a rock-solid scrum. We were able to sustain our scrum and I even dare to say that maybe we were only a little bit right. shoulder to shoulder with Paul Wallace and you know Matt wants to go one way and then you know that he and Tim Robert, who was selected at number eight, obviously had a good understanding of how to play together with Northampton Saints and it must have been a move that maybe Lo had done a couple of times before, but well, I mean, Matt Matt Dawson ran to the corner and I just sold the dummy to use the Van de Mestre one, he's so good to me, he fits everyone in the whole stadium, even when we stopped, so we were.

We followed it and stopped dead, so it was a phenomenal, phenomenal thing, and I think they disallowed the try and then we went out to the other end of the field and scored that try, it just took the game away from us, you know, gave us that. momentum shift and that game changer absolutely, so we mentioned Dawson, try them too. Tati was just as special. We will remember it well. What do you remember about scoring in the corner? Why was it really the icing on the cake? I mean, I think. We felt the game was won at that point because once we took the lead with that wonderful try from Matt Dawson, there was a bit of a panic in South Africa because you know it wasn't like that.

I go to the script, you know, they didn't expect it to be almost like, you know and you know, I don't know, it's a little bit like being a great heavyweight boxer and you're going into the last few rounds of a 12-round tournament. you fight and you know you're ahead and all you have to do is stay ahead looking at it really, it must be quite difficult because all that emotion goes into the first game, when you win, you talked about that guy about how mature a professional there is, maybe it's good question for you, so you win that game and I can't even imagine what the emotion was like after the builder, after the speeches, how do you celebrate that?

I think we were there to win. In a series of tests we were not there to win a test and I think when we establishedour goals from the beginning, I think we all knew that's what we wanted to do, we wanted to win a test series in South Africa. I'm going to lie, there was obviously euphoria because in the three-game series to win the first game is really important. You know it's a lot easier to go ahead and win a series when you don't have to come back, but there was a midweek game in the buildup.

You know, in the second test too, which itself is now, you wouldn't see anything like that. It was incredible that the coachee had to suddenly shift his attention to preparing another team for another game and developing. to a second test, but I remember getting back on the bus and me getting Johnson and a few other players at the back of the bus chatting a little bit and we said look 100 percent, tomorrow we'll be at the training ground, hold on. on the pads for the other guys and you know, they talk about the spirit of the Lions and they talk about the success of the tour, it's not about those players who are necessarily lucky enough to play in a test match, it's about the whole group and the players. had supported us as a group in our preparation for our test match so there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't do the same and you know it was a culture if you like that was driven by the group so yeah , we had a few beers I think we went to a place called Sirens and the well known place in Cape Town with a couple of beers, it wasn't excessive because we had all promised we would endure the tackle. bags on Sunday morning for the guys who were getting ready for a game, I think Tuesday, so that's exactly what happened.

I fell in love with rugby ever since. I know I obviously went celestial pretty early mm. I think yeah, yeah, that's enough to hit another baby, that's all I know, so yeah, we got ready for a game, oh my god, maybe it was like the live tent for me, get out to the beat, This is what I thought, so I watched it. Park, I'm going out. Piss, I'm fighting in training, I get yelled at and then I go to Everest every Saturday or every Monday night, which became a model for the rest of my career, actually, I mean, I was 24 and That's part of it, that's how it is.

Professional rugby is smashed, you go to beat the opponent, you win and then you go out and smash them again. Scotland, oh that's what we lose every week.