LIONS On Their Minds

They are forever inventing new ways of making the same thing a bit more exciting. In rugby union, just at the moment, we have a new set of laws and a Bledisloe Cup match staged in Hong Kong. There are new coaching regimes in England and Ireland gearing up for autumn internationals against the same old opposition, a nearly new one in Wales spicing things up with an ages-old argument over player release, and there is a Scot who has been nominated for best player in the world.

Effortlessly rising above the need to be radical and new, though, is one of the oldest, most fail-safe enterprises in the sport. There is a Lions tour at the end of this season.

This year's series of autumn internationals launched itself with yesterday's groundbreaking Test in Hong Kong and, in a no-doubt-riveting development, all the games over the next month will, for the first time, go towards determining the seedings for the 2011 World Cup. But it is South Africa and 2009 that will really dominate the thinking between now and June.

That is just for those of us watching. For those playing, the incentive for 2009 will loom far larger than that for 2011. 'Playing for your country is certainly something you dream about as a young player,' says Jason Robinson, who knows how good life can get as an international as well as how high - and low - as a Lion. 'But the Lions takes it up another couple of notches. It's something that not many players ever get to do. I was just reminiscing with Brian [O'Driscoll] about our tours together. Although we can't say we've had a series win, we've got such great memories.'

Those tours are the past two - in 2001 to Australia and 2005 to New Zealand. Same result - a series loss - but contrasting experiences. On the first, Robinson and O'Driscoll announced themselves properly to an admiring union world with dazzling tries in a first Test win as emphatic as any by a Lions team. Then, somehow, from half-time in a second Test they were dominating, the Lions surrendered the series to the world champion Wallabies.

'That was very much the one that got away,' O'Driscoll says. 'We had Australia in that second Test, but there was a pivotal moment after half-time with their intercept try. It was one of those that if you could play it all again you would.'

Robinson and O'Driscoll were reunited on the playing fields of Terenure College in Dublin, where they were launching the Irish leg of the HSBC Rugby Festivals. For Robinson, the thunder of a playing career has now passed, and he is enjoying more stately progress as an ambassador and coach, surrounded here by adoring children. O'Driscoll is no less the subject of hero worship, but his day job is still at the sharp end. He is among the many players, superstars and coming men alike, jostling for a place on the plane to South Africa, where the Lions last won a series in 1997.

Declan Kidney, Ireland's new coach, has renamed him captain, despite the widely held expectation that he would be relieved of the task so as to concentrate on his form. O'Driscoll is more than comfortable to be handling the extra responsibility and reserves some scorn for those who think it affects his game. 'That is nonsense,' he says. 'It would mean that I played better in the first three or four years of my career than I have done in the last five or six, which would be an incredible generalization. People, particularly in the media, put tags on you. One person says one thing and everyone else jumps on the bandwagon. I don't buy into it. You're your own best judge and I wouldn't say the captaincy has affected me at all.'

O'Driscoll is one of a tiny elite to have captained a Lions tour and must be in the running to captain this next one, which would elevate him into an even tinier elite to have done it twice. It currently consists of Martin Johnson. 'I'm sure I'd be up for it if asked,' he says. 'Not because of any unfinished business. It's a huge honor, pure and simple.'

The allusion to unfinished business refers to the last Lions tour to New Zealand, a thoroughly miserable affair that Robinson and O'Driscoll remember with a wince. O'Driscoll, the captain, was carried off, out of the tour, in the early minutes of the first Test, his shoulder dislocated in a controversial spear tackle. And the Lions were humiliated.

If ever there were a case of inventing new ways to make the same thing slightly different, it was Sir Clive Woodward's bloated, too-clever-by-half enterprise in 2005. A vast touring party, many of whom had been picked on the back of their form two years earlier, two separate coaching panels, the Prime Minister's former spin doctor - it amounted to an invitation to hosts who don't need one to mete out punishment to the overblown and self-satisfied.

It was a tour that went away from the timeless little things that breed spirit and adventure, such as rooming together. Robinson and O'Driscoll were room-mates for some of the 2001 tour. Robinson tells hysterical tales of rooming with Rob Henderson on the same tour - tales that tourists of any level would recognize of a chain-smoking, room-service-ordering, late-night-TV-watching heavy snorer. Not ideal big-match preparation, certainly, but the sort of thing an international superstar still enjoys reminiscing over. Neither Robinson nor O'Driscoll reminisce a lot about 2005.

There is a feeling that there will be a return to basics for the 2009 version. Ian McGeechan embodies the spirit of the tried and trusted, and no one expects too much deviation from the formula that has brought him unparalleled success as a Lions coach in the past.

Form is the most important criterion, according to Robinson. 'Unless you are playing well, you shouldn't go, no matter what your reputation, which is maybe one of the lessons to take from 2005. Brian knows he will have to be playing well in these autumn internationals and in the Six Nations in order to be in with a shout. And that's how it should be.'

Which brings us on to the troubling state of England. They have found a clever new way of bypassing the argument between club and country, but it has come at a cost - the squad must be picked months in advance, so that it is inevitably out of date by the time the action starts. 'You want your strongest team on the field. The England management, though, have to make a call before a ball's been kicked, and that's not ideal,' Robinson says. 'The system is at fault. In order for England to progress we need to be picking people on form and that can change on a weekly basis. It's worst for the guys who are playing well, but can't be picked. My heart goes out to them.'

Does it go out to his former comrade in arms, Johnson, who has been lumbered with this system as his starting point in a job he has never tried before at any level? 'Short-term, it's going to be hard for him. I'm sure he's going to have to take a lot of stick this autumn. It's certainly not a job I would want, but the important thing is that he obviously believes he can do something. We know all about his character, but this is unknown territory for him and he couldn't have asked for a tougher program.'

Indeed. The southern-hemisphere giants are coming. And the global row about the ELVs is sure to lurch into another phase as north and south collide under whichever of the laws happen to be applicable this month.

O'Driscoll has enjoyed his rugby this season under the ELVs, displaying some of his best form in the recent round of Heineken Cup matches. Interestingly, he thinks the English referees, lambasted by many for enforcing the IRB directives at the breakdown so severely, are the ones doing their job properly. And he laments the loss of the maul. 'To me it's a skill and an art form. It is not a tool that we at Leinster used much, but other teams, like Leicester and Munster, considered themselves masters at it. To have it simply removed seems unjust.'

He has no idea, though, whether the south will be disadvantaged when they come up here to play under our particular version of ELVs. 'I watch very little Super 14,' he says, 'and next to no Tri Nations, so I don't know how they were refereeing it. Their rucks, though, seem even more farcical than ours. I think that free-kick rule is a joke, and I'm glad it hasn't been brought up here. At least not yet.'

But let us leave the IRB to worry about their precious ELVs and World Cup seedings. Hong Kong may have been an unlikely launch pad, but the autumn series is now under way, and the rest of us have simpler, more traditional pleasures. It is time to pick our Lions teams and argue about them. And then to do it again next week, and the next, and so on, right up until the first whistle in Durban.