Well, I suppose it's all about pride now Nobody wants to go out on a 3-0 hiding from this series. It hurts bad enough that we're already 2-0 down, I'd dread to think how I'd feel if we end up losing 3-0 In fact, I don't even want to think about it. I've mentioned before how Lions tours vividly came to life for me when I was a lad watching the Living With Lions video from the 1997 tour. Legends emerged from that tour but so far it's difficult to pick many legends from this version It's still not too late for that to happen. A win against a supremely talented All Blacks side would be a notable achievement because they're setting the bar in world rugby at this time. It's some comfort that Clive Woodward has gone with the same pack again this week because, a few glaring errors apart, I thought the pack did very well last week and even though we've been short of numbers in training this week, we've done even more work as a unit.That's where it all starts for us.
Nomination as Olympic hosts was an honour and a challenge, and, who knows, maybe a massive complication in the life of the city, but London learned quickly and savagely that it was by no means a panacea.When the first horror has receded, it might also prove necessary for the capital to recall the self-mocking advice a passionate Scottish football fan, dismayed by the disappointment provoked by his team, once gave to himself. Certainly in London yesterday there was no disposition to be confused about the relative importance of Olympic involvement and well-ordered lives. Eventually, she returned to competitive athletics and enjoyed great success. "But I never again," she reports, "mistook winning a medal for something more important than living a real life with real values."Such a journey would hardly be necessary today. The original idea of a bunch of athletes from around the world gathering together to celebrate their youth and their talent and their spirit seemed to have been utterly lost I saw the Olympics as a great wheel, churning relentlessly.
Horrible things could happen but the wheel would keep turning."When they held the closing ceremony, and sent balloons flying up into the sky, Brill sat on the roof of one of the buildings in the village, numb and disbelieving in the company of some equally disaffected fellow athletes.Then she went to Munich railway station, bought a ticket for the Italian coast and several litres of wine and lay on a beach for some days. She is still haunted by what she saw as an abandonment of human values, of any sense that sport was not separate from real life.She recalls: "Brundage told the athletes that life was all about overcoming hurdles and the fallen Israeli athletes would have wanted us to continue We could not let them down. I said to one of my team-mates, 'God, we're talking about a bunch of dead people...don't let them down, they're fucking dead.'"I had this overwhelming sense of futility, of being a small person overshadowed by a huge superstructure. Most believed that sport as a metaphor for the forces of anti-terrorism was clumsily inappropriate. Yes, life had to go on, but there was no obligation not to pause.Such a view was alien to the sporting conscience when the Israeli athletes were put to death at Munich airport and the head of the Olympic movement, the American plutocrat Avery Brundage, ordered that the show must go on - as it had four years earlier when, despite the main square of Mexico City running with the blood of protesting students, the Olympics sailed on.One of the athletes ordered to compete in Munich, against her deepest instincts, was Debbie Brill, a young Canadian high jumper who would later hold the world record. Extreme vigilance has to be parcelled along with any surge of celebration.That is the nature of all life, including the sporting one today, and the recall of Munich is most relevant in what it says about the extent to which we have had to change.When the Ryder Cup was abandoned in the wake of 9/11, there was no more than a rustle of disquiet from those who believed that it was a surrender to the terrorists rather than a gracious invitation. The illusion that sport is an island of its own - untouchable and aloof - has been swept aside too many times since 1972 to support the idea.Pre-Munich was pre-security, pre-fear, pre-doubt that something like the Olympics would be a natural target for those who wanted to pervert its mass appeal into a tool of terror.
