Scotland deserve fair share of Lions

WE MAY be exaggerating here, but not by much: since the wonderful Tom Smith made the last of his half-dozen consecutive international appearances in the red jersey of his dreams, as opposed to the blue one, it has been easier to spot a Twickenham chief executive in a food bank than clap eyes on a Test Lion from Scotland.

- CHRIS HEWETT

In the four southern hemisphere series from 2005 to 2017, there were no starters at all. David Attenborough would have declared the species extinct.

Somewhat miraculously, there was a reported reappearance on Springbok territory three years or so ago, but as there were precious few independent witnesses in the midst of the pandemic, we have to take it on trust that Stuart Hogg, Duhan van der Merwe and Ali Price were on the field in Cape Town when the first whistle blew. For all we know, they could have been AI deep fakes rather than real human beings.

In Lions terms, the Scots have been underrepresented more often than not. Agreed, they had their moments back in the dim and distant – John Gillespie, Louis Greig, Robert Neill, Bill Scott and the formidable tour captain Mark Morrison were all picked for another Cape Town encounter with the Boks, this one in 1903; no fewer than seven north-ofthe-borderers started the Johannesburg Test in 1924. But in a portent of miseries to come, there was only one Scot in the entire party for the trip to the Antipodes in 1930…and his name was Welsh. Up, you couldn’t make it.