Farrell plays the O2 Arena but Lions squad reveal slips up by charging fans

Yahoo

08-05-2025

When the scores are tied, there's 50 seconds left on the clock, and you need someone who's going to step up and take that drop goal, then Andy Farrell was your man. And when the series is all-square with one game left to play, and you need someone to give the big speech that's exactly what everyone needs to hear in the last hours before the match, you won't find many better. He may very well turn out to be exactly who you need to lead a group of 38 best players from across Britain and Ireland through a six-week tour of Australia, too.
Whether any of this means Farrell's someone you want to pay to see play the O2 Arena is another matter. But here he was under the bright lights, regardless sandwiched between Usher and Olly Murs in the (un)coveted Wednesday 3pm slot at the Indigo Lounge, front and centre of the British & Irish Lions' first-ever live squad announcement show. 'So what makes the Lions so special, Andy?' asked the presenter, Lee McKenzie. 'Well,' Farrell replied under his breath, 'it's impossible to put into words'. After four years of waiting, the final 30 minutes started to feel painfully long.
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Rugby isn't very good at razzmatazz. Three months back Formula One made a runaway success of using this same venue for its season launch, but then, with the best will in the world, they were offering the attendees a little more than the chance to listen to Irish scrum coach John Fogarty make small talk with Ugo Monye, or offer a round of applause to Gavin Hastings, who was sitting in a box somewhere up in the gods. At one point McKenzie asked Monye what he remembered about the day he found out he had been selected, back in 2009.
'The hardest thing about it was waiting, so shall we just get on with it?' Monye said, which got a loud round of applause. He always did have a good eye for an opening.
Not that it's such a bad idea to turn the British and Irish Lions squad announcement into a live event. The squad selection is, after all, the most distinctive thing about the team, their USP, as the corporate sorts who run the sport say. It's the fact that the Lions had decided they needed to charge people to come along and watch it which felt all wrong. Tickets went on sale for £60, were then reduced to £35, and, in the very end, were being given away for free, first come first serve, and even then there were plenty of empty seats in the room. No one I spoke to who had paid for their place had been offered a refund.
Whatever the Lions are supposed to be about, (and there was, as there always is, an awful lot of talk about their values) it isn't money. It surely would have been a better idea to give the tickets to players, coaches, and administrators who volunteer to help run rugby clubs around the four countries, or people who missed out on going to the 2021 tour to South Africa at the last minute because of the travel restrictions during the pandemic, or even to distribute them to the rugby-playing schools in the neighbourhood, instead of using it as an opportunity to gouge an extra few thousand pounds out of the fans.
The few hundred who had made their way along looked a little lost inside the shopping mall that surrounds the venue. Most decided, in the tradition of these things, that in doubt the best thing to do was get along to the bar for a couple of jars, and there was a rush on in the All Bar One in the lobby. They were all wearing red Lions jerseys of one vintage or another, and swapping war stories about the tours they'd been on together. People love this team, and, given what they pay to follow them, they deserve better than being charged fifty quid to provide room meat for a live stream of a squad naming.
They even had a man out in the crowd telling everyone when it was time to clap. When Maro Itoje walked in they didn't need any prompting, but got to their feet and started whooping and hollering. A couple of burly, bald blokes at the back started celebrating like they'd just won the call-up themselves. Because there is, still, a beautiful idea at the heart of all this. The Lions are unlike anything else in all sport, you just wish it wasn't getting harder and harder to find it, buried there somewhere underneath all the nonsense.