Is it Time to Scrap the Lions Tours?

The 2017 Six Nations is turning out to be one of the most exciting and open in years. With two rounds remaining, there are still three teams in contention to win the championship.

After each round, various journalists have been amending their lists of which players they think might be selected for the British and Irish Lions tour to New Zealand in June.  And yes, this is an enjoyable game and yes, there is a lot of grainy footage available on youtube of gritty and glorious moments from tours of the past. Players seem to still get excited about the prospect of putting on the famous red jersey.

But the Lions tour is a relic of the amateur days of rugby union, when players managed to take two months off their day-jobs to travel by boat to the end of the earth to take on the colonials, which has somehow managed to survive into the twenty-first century.

Many people predicted its demise following the advent of professionalism but since the 1990s, and especially since the mythologised 1997 tour to South Africa (the last of the dirty old tours), the Lions has become a major cash cow for the home unions but even more so for the host country, with tens of thousands of fans from Britain and Ireland travelling to support the away side.

In spite of this, the advantages of the tours to the home countries is questionable. Yes, some players do come back stronger from the Lions experience (the most recent example being Conor Murray) but in the era of high-impact, 'collision' rugby, many others return injured or exhausted and can find it hard to recover their form.

While playing three intense test matches can help the Lions players develop individually, the host team gets to improve as a unit, trying out combinations that may be central  to their efforts to win the next world cup in 2019.  Meanwhile, the home nations are touring with second-string sides in Japan and Argentina.  Isn't preparation for the next world cup of much greater importance than busting your gut for a squad that will only exist for six weeks?

And even the coach is affected. Warren Gatland had to take a season-long break from coaching Wales in order to watch rugby with a more impartial eye and concentrate on selecting his squad.  For a one-off tour? Is that really necessary?

Wouldn't a European Cup every four years be a better option?  It would give the home nations and France another cup to compete for, more experience of knock-out rugby, and also give the likes of Georgia and Romania some more meaningful fixtures. At the same time, the big southern hemisphere teams just might consider playing Japan and the South Sea Islanders a wee bit more often.

So while they are playing 'guess the squad', rugby journalists could pause to think about the whole point of the Lions tours and whether they hinder rather than help the development of the players, the home nations and rugby as a whole.