Ronan O’Gara: I hope Warren Gatland makes an idiot of us all again

British & Irish Lions strength and conditioning coach Paul ‘Bobby’ Stridgeon with head coach Warren Gatland and defence coach Steve Tandy. Picture: INPHO/Billy Stickland

We might all look like right idiots Saturday night. In many respects, better if we do. Warren Gatland has selected a British and Irish Lions team — certainly in respect of the backs — to finish stronger than it starts. There are several selections that will only be properly explained in the fullness of Saturday evening in South Africa.

Attempting to put anything guaranteed alongside those selected to start in Cape Town is a challenge for Gatland and his coaching staff, never mind those of us looking in, scratching our heads.

This is a tour like no other, with issues like no other. The schedule has denied the opportunity to build combinations and trust between partners and units. Four of the build up games have been next to useless. If the physical demands didn’t prevent it, Gatland would have been better served using 24 or 25 players for the first five games to build the reps in training.

Apologies if you’ve heard this before; even for test-standard players, reps 1-4 in training are all learning, reps 4-7 are getting the grasp of things, and only after that do you start getting the speed and accuracy into what you are doing that will be required facing the world champions.

Players are getting to reps 4-5 during the week and then the combos change again. Can you really get a bank of work done in that scenario? Has anyone mentioned the hint of a Babas v the Boks here, where the lack of cohesion and organisation would be an understandable by-product.

Certainly with the starting backs, the coaching ticket is planning to finish strong. That’s fine. One of the most discernible shifts in professional sport in recent times has been the move away from presenting your strongest 11, or 15 at the start. Coaches see the last third or quarter of a game as the widest window to make decisive gains. It’s a philosophy I’m fully on board with now, a sea-change from a century of believing that the starting 15 was the best 15.

In reaching for a practical example to confirm this, just two words are needed: Sean Cronin. A wonderful impact player who will always change the shape and tempo of a game to Leinster’s advantage. There are players who are good, literally, at breaking the opposition down, softening them up in the first hour. They may not be as impactful when space opens up though.

It’s no galloping shock to state that the Lions don’t have X-Factor in terms of a Cheslin Kolbe. But what side does?

Anthony Watson has been really good, but there are very few Kolbes in the world game.

The balance of the starting backs is also influenced by the left of Price and Daly and the big right boot of Hogg at full back. The Lions will want to start well and exit their own territory smartly and efficiently. They were the two big takeaways from the South Africa A game. Price and Biggar are good kickers, Daly and Hogg the same. Four of the seven backs are very proficient in this area, which is instructive in itself in terms of a likely gameplan.

But combination-wise, from Price and Biggar, to Henshaw and Daly, is it realistic that this can all come together in the tighter window imposed by this particular schedule? Daly has played one test in five years at 13.

That Murray and Farrell are on the bench is one thing; starting with Ali Price and Dan Biggar can best be interpreted as a calculated gamble. I’ve watched the Welsh 10 at Northampton this season and from my point of view, he has mixed the average with the good. Naturally, the fact that Farrell has been plying his trade in the Championship and also failed to sparkle in the Six Nations has now given Biggar the opportunity of a lifetime.

Ordinarily, we speak of the Lions test team in the realm of the best of the best. Stuart Hogg has that bit of magic for sure, but the Scot was left out of his club side for their two most important games of the season, the Premiership semi and final, when Exeter went with Jack Nowell. A starting Lion for a test match should be starting with his club, no?

There is one rider with all this: Gatland and company are driving this group, observing them daily on and off the field — none of the rest of us are. There was Billy Vunipola, CJ Stander, Caelan Dorris, but Jack Conan is selected as the Lions eight. Robin McBryde knows his players better than anyone on the outside pontificating and picking holes. No-one can really pick apart management thinking until we see how the selection unfurls in Cape Town.

Easier to agree with the selection of Alun Wyn Jones. This group is crying out for leadership, and the Welsh totem exudes that quality.

The complication (with a 5-3 bench split) is losing him to a recurrence of the shoulder issue.

On the right-hand side of the scrum, the tight-head side, it is beneficial to have bulk and size, a la a Will Skelton; but while Tadhg Beirne and Hamish Watson are standout performers coming in, how effective can they be in the tight against some of the behemoths that South Africa will introduce off the bench.

Handre Pollard makes a big difference to the Springboks, and this is a seismic occasion for the world champions; bringing that status into a Lions test series ramps up the prestige for the hosts. This will only come second to a World Cup for many of them. Do not underestimate the value of fear on the Lions side either. And don’t underestimate the lift that Williams, Farrell, Beirne, Watson, and Murray will give the tourists after 50 minutes.

But we are all in a place where, for the first test at least, analysis is like fishing deep in that party barrel of melting ice and beers wondering what you will come up with. There are no answers, only questions and concerns.

For the first time ever, there is a massive void in this tour, an emptiness or hollowness to it. The countdown to the opening test has been anti-climactic. Of course we get the financial imperative of this tour and that the club structure is sucking at the teat of the international game, but a Lions tour without travelling support in the stands is a concert without an orchestra in the pit.

On the domestic front, the Top 14 clubs return to training next week. You might have seen that Darren Sweetnam is no longer at La Rochelle and has signed for Oyonnax. His departure from here had less to do with the individual and his quality than it did the demands to register JIFF-qualified players for our squad. However, I think he’s been bitten by the French lifestyle and wanted to stay here a bit longer.

Ultimately he needs game time. Hopefully he plays 20-odd games this season, finds his stride, and perhaps looks at a return here in a year’s time! He was very popular with the group, he really settled in but one game out of every four is not going to get things done.

However we mightn’t have seen the last of Sweets.