Call it sour grapes, call it un-British, call it against the spirit of the Lions. Call it whatever you want, frankly. But, as a proud Welshman, I did not bother watching the first Test against Australia on Saturday.
Call it sour grapes, call it un-British, call it against the spirit of the Lions. Call it whatever you want, frankly. But, as a proud Welshman, I did not bother watching the first Test against Australia on Saturday.
Everyone who knows me, and even those who don’t, know I’m a massive rugby fan. I haven’t missed a Wales game for decades. Not missed a Lions Test since 1997.
“Excited for the Lions?” is the usual chit-chat. The best I can muster is a shrug.
I wrote, when the squad was announced, that I’d struggle to cheer for the British and Irish Lions containing only two Welshmen. That struggle has been real. I’ve not watched a single full game. I caught the second half of the opener against Argentina, and that confirmed my worst fears. I simply don’t care.
On tours gone by, I haven’t missed a single minute. My friends and I would have worked out which pub will be serving beers from 8am to go with our breakfasts long in advance of the first Test.
It’s usually my favourite rugby moment of the four-year cycle. Better than Wales vs England in the Six Nations, better than the Autumn internationals and better, even, than the World Cup.
But with no Welshman in the Test squad for the first time since 1896, the usual buzz has been replaced with, well, empty nothingness. I have no dog in this fight.
Some might have argued that Jac Morgan deserved to be starting, or at least on the bench and his omission led to whispers from some of my Welsh comrades that they are now supporting the Wallabies instead.
Tom Curry had a poor tour in the build-up to the Test opener and Morgan has been a Welsh rugby success story, which is rarer than unicorn excrement at the moment.
We Welsh can’t feel robbed at his exclusion, though. Yes, we might feel hard done by that Tomos Williams’ dodgy hamstring got him sent him home after he had started the tour so brightly. But we didn’t have a Lion involved on Saturday because our national team haven’t produced enough good players, neatly highlighted by celebratory tears after beating Japan last weekend.
Yes, Japan. Nobody consigns us to our 19th defeat in a row and gets away with it... dear me.
So, for the first time in a long time, I did not tuck enthusiastically into a breakfast cider with an all-dayer mapped out ahead of me. Instead, I took the kids to the 11.15am screening of the new CBeebies musical The Great Ice Cream Hunt.
It was as dreadful as it sounds and I fell asleep in the reclining chairs. I then got suckered into a £14 boat ride in the pouring rain. An infinitely better morning than watching a game I didn’t care about. I’d got my fix of that earlier in the morning with New Zealand vs France.
Isobel, three, insisted (rightly, it turns out) on wearing her wellies while Elliott, five, brushed off the fact his arm was recently broken falling from the slide on Nanny’s bouncy castle.
I didn’t even check the result. And at the time of writing, I don’t know the score or any of the details. Maybe I never will.
Sitting down and watching that game would have been like going to a wedding or a funeral of a stranger.
You might empathise with the emotions on display, but you can’t possibly feel them deeply yourself because you don’t know these people.
I feel really sad about not caring, because I know I should. But I can’t turn British instead of Welsh for a day if there’s nobody there from the motherland.
The Lions is no longer “we” to me, it’s “them”, and that is a tragedy.
Category: General Sports
