‘Machine’ Maro Itoje can match All Black power

For years the All Blacks have reigned supreme thanks to their never say die mental strength and the supreme stamina to back it past the 80th minute. Yet the man who keeps the Lions in the peak of physical fitness believes the tourists can match those attributes as their series goes down to the wire at Eden Park on Saturday.

The Lions’ head of strength and conditioning Paul Stridgeon is confident Warren Gatland’s players can time their run to the final game of an extremely long campaign to perfection with a bench every bit as strong as New Zealand can regularly deploy and which is usually enough to overpower national Test sides.

While blending players from four nations at short notice and asking them to compete with the fluency of a side that has trained and played together for many years has its pitfalls in terms of fluency and gameplan, from a physical performance point of view the combined strength of the Lions gives Stridgeon an embarrassment of riches, not least the chance to work with a forward whose athleticism marks him out as “a machine”.