Lions 24-28 Argentina
No excuses. Not one. Not from Andy Farrell. “We need to be better than that,” the British & Irish Lions’ head coach said after the 28-24 defeat to Argentina that appeared to hurt him like hell, even if it was only a warm-up, and not a Test match.
These were eye-opening moments in the aftermath in Dublin. If you wanted to argue it wasn’t even a proper part of the tour, as it was played on home soil, and the trip starts when the players board three flights carrying the squad down under for a Sunday arrival, then Farrell disagreed. Profoundly and profusely.
Argentina had “a fight and hunger we can’t accept,” Farrell said, as he laid out his view of the match as containing too many sloppy passes thrown “blindly” with no fixed target by the Lions, that led to ball on the floor and “scraps that always seemed to go to Argentina”.
He said “some [Lions] players will have done the team proud; others won’t be happy.”
If you hadn’t seen and heard much of Farrell in recent years, in his regular job as head coach of Ireland since 2019, and are only just learning about the man’s modus operandi, this was a revelation.
The Lions’ dressing room under Farrell will not be a safe harbour for putting things right later. His hot take is there are just five matches down under before the first Test in Brisbane on 19 July, and none of them are likely to feature as capable an opponent as these Pumas, so there is no time to waste.
The Lions looked unfamiliar and out of sorts (Photo: PA)Maro Itoje, the Lions’ captain, referred disparagingly to “tippy-tappy football”. And it may be that what Farrell was getting at was the kind of instinctive, pull-back passes you see when Ireland are in full flow should not have been pushed here by players who cannot yet possess the right feel for each other.
Be ambitious, yes, but above all make it stick. Tommy Freeman and Tadhg Furlong may be two of the Lions reviewing offloads with concern.
Another way of looking at it was to say, yes, there were offloads attempted when they were not quite on, but only as part of a getting-to-know-you phase.
Not as Farrell saw it. And the ultimate discord was that to take your place among the sell-out 51,700 crowd in the Aviva Stadium was to feel a love and support for the team and the concept that ultimately jarred with the way the team itself felt about what they produced.
Farrell wanted that settling-in phase to be short and much more accurate. “A little bit tentative, a little bit off,” was among his kinder descriptions. The attack was “clunky”, although here he did concede the challenge of his Ireland-style system was “completely new to this side.”
The Lions’ scrum went well, and apart from making the Wallabies think hard about their selections there, it should make Ellis Genge the loosehead prop one of those who feels he did the team proud. A Genge in his pomp can only be good on a short tour.
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There were also a couple of effective mauls including one that brought a penalty try to the Lions at the start of the second half.
Near the end, though, with Argentina having shown the collective brilliance they have produced in top competitions for years, to create the winning try by Santiago Cordero, the Lions failed markedly to pull a victory out of the fire.
A misdirected line-out, a neck-roll penalty from Tadhg Beirne, a dropped ball in contact, all let the Pumas away to a win they celebrated wildly, even if it counted for nothing in world rankings as it was an uncapped friendly.
It added to the mixed history of these money-making warm-ups. The 2005 Lions drawing unconvincingly against Argentina in Cardiff, then the 2013 and 2021 vintages handed easy-beat opposition to defeat the Barbarians and Japan in Hong Kong and Edinburgh respectively.
And if the argument is none of these amount to a hill of beans when set against the history-making Test series, Farrell was having none of it, because he sees all of it as interlinked.
“[Farrell] gives it to us straight, there’s no mucking around or no hiding here, he just tells you how it is,” said Bundee Aki, the Ireland centre who scored a bullocking early try here. Take it from one who knows.
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