Lions' support team keeps on growing

The 1974 Lions took off from Heathrow with a management team of two. No specialist coaches, no analysts, no spin doctors, no physios, not even a bucket-and-sponge man.

- PETER JACKSON

During their safari across South Africa, The Invincibles played twice a week for 11 weeks. They lost none of their 22 matches and only one of their 30-man squad to injury, a tribute to their resilience made all the more so by the fact that a baby crocodile tried to take a piece of Mervyn Davies’ right arm.

For repairing the wound, as well as mundane matters like groin strains and tight hamstrings, the Lions relied on local doctors. The two they had on board were otherwise engaged as players: Ken Kennedy and JPR Williams.

Kennedy, the Irish hooker who would go on to run a highly recommended sports clinic in London, devised breathing exercises to increase the collective lung capacity while JPR took blood samples before and after training to evaluate changes at altitude.

On the field, the Lions had to make do with volunteers from the St John Ambulance Brigade, remembered on one occasion by Willie John McBride as 'two little old men waving a bit of Elastoplast, a pair of scissors and a bottle of water'. As captain McBride worked in tandem with the tour manager, Alun Thomas, a Lion in his own right some 20 years earlier.

Thomas had an assistant manager, Syd Millar, so-called at a time when the Establishment went to any length to avoid calling a coach a coach. The word smacked of professionalism and therefore its existence was to be disguised in a cloak of anonymity.

Millar coached the squad and, quite properly, had a major say in picking the team. Back in South Africa 23 years later for the first tour of the professional era, the management-technical had escalated to 11 under Fran Cotton’s management.