Farrell's Lions snub means he misses a major milestone

Never at any stage since his professional debut at the age of 17 had Owen Farrell been deemed surplus to requirements, until yesterday.

- PETER JACKSON

On those unusual occasions when England chose to start without their captain, they would always take the precaution of making sure they had him on the bench in case of emergency, likewise the Lions before deciding the time had come to cut the umbilical cord.

Farrell, lauded only the other week by Sir Ian McGeechan as ‘a Test match animal’, found himself reduced to the anonymity of a masked bystander for the series decider. In the circumstances, nobody can have been surprised that a season of personal dissatisfaction should come to such an anti-climactic end.

By a strange quirk of fate, his failure to make the bench, let alone the starting XV, will have left him with a bit more than a mental bruise or two, quite something for a player whose granite-like fortitude made him appear immune to human frailty.

It also left him high and dry on 99 Tests and, more significantly, one last chance to complete a century unlike no other. None of the six fly-halves who reached three figures did so in their twenties.