Some of the Lions management may pretend to be a little apologetic about the sombreness, severity and sobriety of this tour, but Phil Larder doesn't. The dapper-looking, no-nonsense, Oldham-born rugby league convert says it as he sees it and makes no apology for wanting desperately to put one over the Aussies. He is a man on a mission. This is his holy grail.
One senses he hasn't been the happiest bunny in the party this past week and that he probably hasn't endeared himself to everyone on tour. In an international context, Larder has spent his career being beaten by the Australians. He's patently sick of it . He's been to Australia five times and lost every series, three on rugby league tours and two as defensive coach to Clive Woodward's England.
"In the league series we've always won one, but we always lost the first so we were always in a catch-up position. In two of them it was the last one we won which meant the series had already been won. My ambition has always been to beat Australia in a test series in their own country," he says, the steely-eyed look matching the candour of the statement.
"They're also world champions, the best team in the world. That's why I was so pissed off On Saturday because I thought we'd got 'em."
As Larder is more expert at losing to the Australians than anyone else in this party, no one's better qualified to say what it is that puts them apart. Ask him what it is that sets the Australians apart and the sense of this tour being a holy grail for the 56-year-old becomes even more apparent, as even more so does his acute sense of frustration. Not just with the way results have invariably panned out, but the underlying causes of them as well.
"In league it's the number one sport. I still think it is but certainly league is not quite as strong as it used to be. When I used to come over the Sydney competition, the Australian domestic competition, was way ahead of anything else. They just had better, more experienced footballers that were used to playing higher quality matches."
"One of the things Australian rugby union has got right is the number of matches they play in a season. I means our guys are absolutely knackered and the Australians have controlled that."
"One of the things about these guys is that they're very, very smart. One of the first things I learnt when I came over here on my first visit was to get what they call the front office right, the administration right. And both the administration of Australian rugby league and Australian rugby union is geared to winning international matches."
"And if I go back home the administration in England is geared to making money and having a strong club competition," he says, warming to his task and raising his voice a notch. "That's the difference. That's why they're so strong. Everything in Australia is geared to the top and that's the international team," he concludes, pointing his hands in a pyramid like shape.
He's a deep-thinking soul, who you sense is almost obsessive about his job; especially on this tour. Way, way back after the first match against Western Australia, the squad was delayed for around six hours in Perth before boarding the flight to Townsville, and Larder spent much of that time cocooned in a computer room off the departure room studying the analysis of the tour opener.
His inclusion in the panel here is testimony to his impressive CV and the striking results he has achieved with England. After a useful professional club career with Oldham and Whitehaven, Larder became the first director of coaching for rugby league in England in 1982, then serving as assistant coach to the English league team from '85 to '92, from where he moved into club coaching with Widnes, Keighley and Sheffield.
Larder coached the rugby league team from 1995 to '97, enjoying a rare win in a World Cup opener over Australia which the latter subsequently atoned for before becoming an advisor on England's defence under Clive Woodward four years ago and an official defensive coach in 2000.
It's all well and good England putting up a near impenetrable wall at Six Nations level, but as he concedes the Australians traditionally represent a different challenge.
"The Australians have bigger, stronger three-quarters who are very adept at taking the ball to the (gain) line and off-loading. They also have the best decoy runners in the world. We think they have taken it a little bit too far and a lot of these decoy runners actually obstruct. They do it very well and they ask us a lot of questions."
The Wallabies provide more unrelentingly persistent and patterned questions of the Lions defence, whereas the tourists possess possibly the greater individual threat from the likes of Brian O'Driscoll and Jason Robinson.
"No, they haven't got a Lomu and they haven't got a Cullen, and the thing about them is that they can recycle possession so well, so that when they get the ball at times they don't play an expansive game, they just put two passes together. Bang, bang, bang, bang, but it's remorseless."
This was best exemplified by the Wallabies' third try through Matt Burke, when the Wallaby runners kept rumbling onto George Gregan's varied off-loads until finally Owen Finegan breached the red line to draw in Jason Robinson and off-load for Burke to then crash through two tackles.
Whereas the first two tries were off turnovers, which he stressed was much harder to defend against, the third try "peeved me a little bit. Every time we stopped them they got behind us, which is an area of concern."
That said he was patently reluctant to offer up any excuses in advance and says there's been enough time to put together a defensive system which he is "satisfied" with. That said, the high, elbow-led, Nathan Grey 'tackle' which left Richard Hill concussed and ruled out of Saturday's game also still rankled "If I go back to my league days and if one of my players had done that, I would have expected him to be on the sidelines for six weeks.
"It was a blatant hit with the elbow on the chin, no doubt about it." Larder said he was "very, very disappointed" with the lack of action taken by the match commission, New Zealander David Grey.
"These are professional tours. We have one objective and that is to win the test series."
Well, Phil Larder has one objective anyhow on this tour. Lunch is for wimps. If you want a friend, get a dog. Man on a mission.
