Donal Lenihan's suite in the Lions' hotel in Freemantle is one of the perks of his job. Two double-seater couches meet at right angles off a low, glass-topped coffee table. Connecting his "office" and his "bedroom" is a walled-in television closet. Outside is a furnished terracotta balcony. All that's missing from the suite is a sense of being lived in.
That's because it hasn't been. Lenihan says he enjoys watching television, yet on the third day of the tour he still hasn't had a chance to turn his set on. Yesterday he had to spend three hours with Australian Rugby Union officials arguing the toss, as it were, over the selection of neutral referees for only one of the seven non-Test matches as opposed to four.
Sure, there's the possibility of glory at the end of it all if the Lions win the Test series. He's an achiever and this would be the ultimate achievement. Yet you still half wonder why he bothers with all the hassle and the very real risk of doing his name ever-lasting damage. Nothing quite sullies the reputation of a former player, even a legend, like a losing Lions tour - witness Willie John McBride.
"I've been involved in international rugby a long time (it is 20 years since his debut against Australia), but I would say this is the biggest learning curve of all. We've only been away a week and a bit but it's been stimulating and fascinating; and I think that's why you do it. Yeah, the downside if things go bad is you get lacerated, but let's be positive and go for it." To highlight the uniqueness of the Lions concept, Lenihan takes you back to the first full squad meeting of last Saturday week and lists off the Martin Johnsons, Lawrence Dallaglios and Dai Youngs with their litany of Lions tours and caps. "It was my first chance to address the whole party, and they're all sitting there like school boys with pale white faces. I think it's bigger than anyone, that's why it's special. Even at international level you can have 80 caps and yet feel you have to prove something."
Lenihan's own Lions career as a player was unfulfilled and certainly very unlucky. His initial selection, enforced withdrawal and subsequent call-up as a replacement for the 1983 tour still rankles. As does the lack of a tour in 1986 due to the boycott of South Africa, when he was in his prime. Leading the midweek side in Australia offered some consolation.
"I didn't play in a Test match, and that is hugely disappointing at the end of the day. I would have made the Test team in '83 and still nearly made it in two weeks. In '86 I played in the XV that started against the Rest of the World (in a one-off match), so the likelihood is I'd have played in the Test team, and in '89 you'd moved into the era of the 6 foot, 8 inch locks."
He admits the experience may be cited as partly motivating him to do what he's doing. He relives the 1983 experience in painful detail. He was 22. He was leaving home for three months. Whereupon everything went wrong. For the medical tests on assembly, the 30-man squad were broken up into four groups based on nationality ("which maybe says a lot about how disorganised it was").
Following a reception in the New Zealand embassy, Lenihan was last of the 30 players to be examined. He'd been standing around all day, and so the fluids and swelling built up on his torn muscle which he says was wrongly diagnosed as a hernia. He was sent to his room and told not to talk to anyone. He told John O'Driscoll, a doctor in the squad, who tried to give a lenient second opinion but Willie John McBride, the manager, ordered Lenihan home before breakfast so as not to upset other Irish squad members.
So he surreptitiously returned some gear to Michael Kiernan, whom he'd travelled over with. "I remember getting a taxi ride to Heathrow at 6.30 a.m., and ringing home to say I'm coming home. It was appalling." Something else stuck with him from that one night in London with the Lions. While in a room with O'Driscoll, McBride and Lions captain Ciaran Fitzgerald, he remembers the latter saying: "I feel like declaring myself." That puzzled him. A few weeks later Moss Finn and Dr Con Murphy took him to a pub in Crosshaven to watch the first Test, and Finn asked him if he declared his hernia, because Moss Keane had phoned Finn suggesting Lenihan must have declared it, given everyone knew Fitzgerald had a hernia the size of a tennis ball. Then the penny dropped, and young Lenihan felt even more shattered. When he later went out as a replacement for Bob Norster, Lenihan had his suspicions confirmed by Fitzgerald. He never said a word on tour, though he did two years later upon meeting the same Scottish team doctor after Ireland's 1985 win in Murrayfield, even if the fault for his poor treatment could be shared widely.
It wasn't missing out on the Tests that rankled with him. It was missing the rugby culture and development as a 22-year-old, akin to what Ronan O'Gara, Brian O'Driscoll and Malcolm O'Kelly are experiencing now. "I was robbed of that," says Lenihan, not bitterly. He'd like to think he'd treat today's players more sympathetically.
Playing for Ireland, however, there were two Triple Crowns and three championships - one shared and two won outright. He also captained Ireland in the inaugural 1987 World Cup, though he cites the ill-preparedness of Ireland's squad as a starting point for the relative decline which followed.
"I think we were confused. Professionalism forced Irish rugby to grab a hold of itself." Yet, amidst the freefall came the heartbreak of that last ditch World Cup quarter-final defeat to Australia in 1991 - the most disappointing defeat of his career. "I knew I was at the end of my career anyway and to be within a minute or two of playing New Zealand in a World Cup semi-final at Lansdowne Road . . . I think we would have had a chance, we could have been in a World Cup final, almost despite ourselves. Because two weeks before we had lost to Gloucester in a warm-up match, but we were capable of one-offs, and Eddie O'Sullivan was our fitness advisor and briefly we were as fit as most other teams."
Ireland are seeing the benefits of the IRFU's more advanced thinking since 1995, he reckons, though having witnessed the largely English-influenced backroom staff with the Lions he adds the rider: "Having seen what I've seen over the last 10 days I'm even more convinced that if we're not prepared to spend and go to the next level, we'll fall way behind again. The bar is being raised all the time."
As it was, and as Irish manager, Lenihan still had to suffer the low of losing the World Cup quarter-final to Argentina in Lens. "It was a rugby experience I'll never forget. It took me some time to get over it. It grated in my stomach for weeks and months." It made the turnaround against Scotland all the more satisfying, as well as the wins over Italy and especially, after 15 years of hurt, France. "I probably got more individual satisfaction from that one game than any other."
His neck is on the line more than ever now but he's well prepared. Making sure the four disparate national entities mix he sees as his biggest role. "That everybody feels involved, that everybody feels they have a place." To that end he had six meetings with the Impact specialists employed to engender squad morale even before last week's get-together. He knows it sounds cliched but the motto is: One Party, One Goal. To win the Test series. Everything must be geared toward that. "Whether you're the doctor or the goalkicker or you don't play in the Tests, that's what it's about."
Beyond that, he'd like to think the squad will reflect on the tour fondly, and remember their manager similarly. That in 10 years' time they will feel inclined to put out their hand and offer it to a decent bloke as well as a good manager. It would be hard to see him fail in that regard.
