My Lions team are ready for take-off

THERE is a view that picking a Lions Test team almost seven months before the 2025 Lions tour to Australia, as this week’s column does, is an empty exercise because it will bear little resemblance to the lineup in the series against the Wallabies.

- NICK CAIN

I disagree. Throughout the eras, professional or amateur, Lions coaches, managers and selection panels, whether Dr Doug Smith and Carwyn James in 1971 or Andy Irvine and Warren Gatland in 2013, have scoured the playing stocks of the four home unions looking for the best of the best at least a year ahead of the tour.

Throughout that period the player rankings and potential combinations are changed and refined by the head coach – and discussed by fans – making it one of the great talking points in rugby. The build-up to this summer’s tour is no exception, and the extensive autumn series, in which each of the four home unions played Australia, has provided head coach Andy Farrell with a selection template from which to build.

Farrell will be looking already at a shortlist of captains, and the same will apply to identifying the key players along the spine of a Lions Test team, and those in the rest of a prototype starting line-up.

As long as established Test Lions have not suffered from the severest slumps in form during the four years between tours, most coaches will lean towards the old mantra that “form is temporary, but class is permanent”.