Pride, infamy, and Argentina's rope-a-dope: Remembering the Lions' last meeting with Los Pumas

The 42

5 hours ago

LIONS AND PUMAS don't cross paths in the wild but there have been rare tear-ups on the rugby field, the latest of which will see Andy Farrell's side seek to bear its teeth against Felipe Contepomi's Argentina at the Aviva Stadium.
The British and Irish Lions thrice toured Argentina in the early 20th century and tonight's game in Dublin will mark the eighth meeting between the sides.
The seventh, which took place 20 years ago at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium, sits equally in Argentinian rugby legend as it does in Lions infamy.
The hastily arranged fixture was designed to chip some £10 million (then €14.6m) off the cost of touring New Zealand with a party exceeding 80 players and staff.
Head coach Clive Woodward's bigger-and-better approach ultimately ended in agony in Aotearoa, and were it not for eight minutes of stoppage time and a last-play Jonny Wilkinson penalty, the warm-up game against Los Pumas in Wales would have done the same.
Only three starting players from the Lions' 25-25 draw with Argentina retained their place for the first Test against the All Blacks in Christchurch just over a month later.
But for several of the rest of the squad that set off for New Zealand, that Cardiff fixture would become the closest they came to earning a proper Lions Test cap.
'Well, I'm claiming it, anyway!' laughs Scottish scrum-half Chris Cusiter, who came off the bench against Los Pumas as the Lions attempted to salvage their pride in the final quarter.
For Wales' Grand Slam-winning captain Michael Owen, meanwhile, it was a game of additional significance.
The Lions had based themselves in the Vale of Glamorgan, training at the University of South Wales Playing Fields where Owen had played with Pontypridd for over a decade. The back row sat as a Lions panelist in the same dressing-room seat as he did when he was a Ponty under-11.
Then, with tour captain Brian O'Driscoll rested for the Pumas game, the Welsh skipper was asked to lead the Lions at his own national stadium.
'It all happened so quickly,' Owen tells The 42. I was 24 as well, quite young.
'I think the game was quite last-minute and the funny thing is I don't remember the exact moment I was told I'd be captain, which is strange because I usually have a good memory of these kinds of details.
'I'm not sure if you take it in at that age as much as you should do, really; as a player, you're just doing it, and then it's just happening. If I had the opportunity to do it now, I'd fully appreciate it because I realise as an older and wiser man that it's not an everyday sort of thing.'
Michael Owen in action for the Lions against Argentina. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
Replacement scrum-half Cusiter, who was 23 at the time, equally struggles to remember Clive Woodward's team announcement from earlier in the week.
But he remembers acutely the concoction of emotions with which he contended upon learning that he would make his first Lions appearance in the Lions' first ever home match, and at a ground which was already dear to his heart.
'Firstly, it was pure excitement,' Cusiter says. 'I got my first Scotland cap in the same stadium a year earlier — and it's an incredible stadium between the atmosphere and the design — so to get my first game for the Lions in the Millennium, I was really excited.
'Then there were the nerves — just about the game as normal, but also nerves around getting injured before boarding the plane and actually getting that experience of touring.
'Also, Jonny Wilkinson was at 10, so there was another factor!' Cusiter laughs. 'He'd obviously won the World Cup a couple of years before, and he was obviously 'Jonny Wilkinson', so it was a big, big deal to play for the Lions with him.
'The thing is, four years earlier, I'd gone out to Australia with my rugby club at the time, Watsonians, to watch that 2001 Lions tour. It was so surreal to actually wear the jersey, then, and find myself playing with all of these famous guys like Jonny, Shane Williams, Shane Horgan — all of these guys that I had admired.'
The Argentine Rugby Union had been equally smitten when they were offered around £500,000 (€750k) to test the Lions' whiskers on the eve of the tour, some of the fee contingent on their fielding a first-choice team to bolster ticket sales in Britain and Ireland.
That would prove a problem outside the Test window: the French season and European cup competitions had not yet finished. Six frontline Pumas featured in the Challenge Cup and Heineken Cup finals for French and English sides that same weekend. In all, 26 Argentinian players were forced to turn down invitations from head coach Marcelo Loffreda to join the national-team squad for the short-notice one-off.
Loffreda's stocks were bolstered, however, when legends Lisandro Arbizu and Mauricio Reggiardo ended their international retirements having stepped away following the 2003 World Cup, and Federico Méndez agreed to come in from the cold for one final mission.
With Mario Ledesma's starting position locked in, fellow hooker Méndez volunteered to start at tighthead. Head coach Loffreda granted him that starting jersey, but Méndez wore the number one of a loosehead, swapping shirts with Reggiardo.
This wasn't a sleight of hand but something more pure: Méndez had made his debut for Los Pumas wearing number one in 1990 and he wished to bow out the same way 15 years later.
Which is not to say that Argentina were averse to subterfuge in the lead-up.
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Loffreda recalls reading somewhere in the English-speaking media that Woodward's all-star side would beat his ragtag outfit by 70-odd points. He instructed his players that Argentina would lean into that sentiment at every public opportunity in an effort to throw the Lions off the scent.
As the Pumas boss puts it, 'We had eight days together to prepare for the game. We put a little plan in place — not a trap necessarily, but a plan.
'Before going to Wales, we did a press conference and said that for us, it would be an honour to play against the Lions; it was a privilege but we had to apologise because we didn't have our best team, and we talked about all the weaknesses in our team. We spoke about them so that they would underestimate us.
'When we arrived in Wales, we spoke to the journalists and said the same thing. We were really honoured, 'but the only thing is that we have a team missing lots of our best players because they are playing in playoffs for their clubs.'
'We thought it could influence the Lions players who would think, 'This will be an easy match.' We wanted them to think they had won before the game kicked off.'
Two decades on from the Lions' come-from-behind, last-gasp draw, captain Michael Owen believes the Pumas' rope-a-dope at the very least contributed to his side's disjointed performance.
'I think that was part of the problem: with all of the talk in the media, I don't think we actually thought we could lose,' says former Dragons and Saracens back row Owen.
'We probably felt we were good enough as a collective to win the game, so the mentality was that it was a warm-up match that we would win — and Argentina immediately made it more difficult than we maybe expected.
'We obviously didn't play to our best capabilities. I don't know was it the short run-in or whether we got caught up in the media– well, I don't want to call it a circus, but all of the stuff around the Lions, and maybe we forgot that we actually had to play a game.
'You're playing for the Lions so you're on top of the world — but that's where rugby is at its best: it can trip you up when you take your eye off the fundamental basics.
'We were probably a bit too focused on things like attacking patterns and took our eye off really simple things like running hard with the ball and defence, which are the things that actually underpin a good performance.
'And it became a tough ol' match, didn't it?' Owen laughs.
Scrum-half Cusiter was sprung from the bench for the final quarter with the Lions in a six-point hole.
The sides had traded tries in the first half but the Pumas' superior scrum — with a tighthead at loosehead and a hooker at tighthead — coupled with the Lions' indiscipline had given Federico Todeschini the platform to positively punish the hosts from the tee.
The second half was an arm wrestle, with Argentina routinely shutting the door in the face of the Lions' increasingly desperate advances. Young Scotsman Cusiter was sent on to pick the lock, partnering Wilkinson at half-back.
Cusiter in action against Los Pumas. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
'Aw, it all happens in a bit of a blur,' Cusiter says. 'It's almost the same feeling as that first cap for Scotland where everything's so quick and so intense. You're just kind of going on autopilot, really.
'I think the first few passes I threw… went to hand,' Cusiter laughs.
'I was aware in the moment of the occasion, the magnitude of it. For me personally, it was beyond my wildest dreams, I would say, growing up in Aberdeen, to play for the British and Irish Lions.
'And I'm aware of that dream becoming a reality, which in itself is surreal, and with that comes this pressure: you want to show that you belong there. You want to perform.
'We were all-out attack and we actually played pretty well in those last 20 minutes. We put them under pressure.'
The Lions ultimately salvaged a draw, Wilkinson sparing their blushes with a pair of penalties. And let no more be said about it.
'Well, to be fair, wasn't there like seven minutes of injury time?' Cusiter laughs.
There were, in fact, just over 88 minutes and 30 seconds gone — under the old timing system, it should be noted — when Wilkinson stroked over his final kick from left of centre. Cusiter believes Australian referee Stuart Dickinson was 'pretty generous to give us that opportunity not to lose.'
And while the Argentinians were galled to have a famous victory snatched away from them so late in the day, Loffreda these days describes the game as 'such a special memory'.
'I worked as the team manager for Los Pumas in 2020 and 2021, the players asked me to tell the story about that game. So I told them and we had a lovely time remembering the match. It was an important learning experience for us.'
Argentina, of course, went on to finish third at the following World Cup in 2007. Incidentally, their side of the story is that the Lions tried to negotiate down their match fee on account of the second- and third-string personnel they brought to Cardiff, but paid in full when they were reminded of the result.
From the outside looking in, the Lions' performance against Argentina — minus plenty of their own star names, granted — foreshadowed a grim summer in the Land of the Long White Cloud.
But when Owen is asked if there was a cloud hanging over the tourists as they boarded the plane the following day, he replies: 'I don't think so.'
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'It's hard to think back to exactly how you were feeling at the time but I think it was a game where we felt we just hadn't sorted our basics out,' he adds. 'We were still excited going on tour. I don't think it was, like, a massive downer just because we didn't win.
'The thing is, you're going to New Zealand and they were amazing. I just don't think that we, as a Lions team, ever got the best out of ourselves on that tour. I do think the talent, the players, were there. But we sort of, for whatever reason, never really got close to maxing out the performance levels we were capable of.
'I do believe part of it was that Wales had won the Grand Slam, probably unexpectedly, which might have changed ideas around selection, but we also probably persevered with a few of the English lads who were just past their peak at the time.
'But I'm not saying that even if we had achieved our full potential, it would have been good enough to win a series against that New Zealand team. I'm just saying that I think we could have performed a bit better than we did.'
On the latter point, Cusiter is in full agreement.
'It's probably changed a wee bit now but especially back then, rugby was the be-all and end-all in New Zealand,' he says. 'The challenge was not only beating that fantastic team with the likes of Justin Marshall, Dan Carter, Tana Umaga, but the fact that the whole country was massively against you.
The media were absolutely savage from day one,' the Scotsman laughs. 'Like, they just went after us in every possible way. It was very, very hostile.
'I just don't see how we could have won it. I know Sam Warburton's team drew a series there 12 years later but we were just nowhere near.
'And there's been a lot of analysis done on Clive [Woodward]'s approach — and look, it obviously didn't work. There were things like everyone having their own rooms, and I think we definitely missed out on something there. But if Clive's approach had worked, it probably would have been the blueprint for touring parties for years to come. He tried something different.
'I think we were up against it regardless of Clive's approach because that New Zealand team were simply that good.
'Once we got beaten by the Maori in Hamilton, it was like, 'This is…' Well, let's just say, 'We're up against it here.'
Woodward's 2005 tour didn't go to plan. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
Owen equally pinpoints that 19-13 defeat to New Zealand Maori on 11 June as the game in which he played his way out of the frame for a Test berth despite an otherwise bright start to his own tour.
In all three meetings with the All Blacks, the Welsh captain's place in Woodward's 23 went instead to late call-up and international teammate Ryan Jones who, in fairness, was among the Lions' better performers in the Tests.
'That's just the way it goes, isn't it?' Owen says. 'I remember after the tour, I was gutted not to have made the Test team.
'When you're a player, your perception is warped. You either feel like a complete failure or a roaring success. And obviously there have been advancements in things like sports psychology since my playing days which encourage players to be more level, more process-driven. But at the time, having missed out on the Test team, I felt like I'd failed.'
Cusiter narrowly missed out on a place in the matchday squad for the second All Blacks game in Wellington. With likely Test starter Dwayne Peel carrying a niggle, the Scotsman was taken off at half-time in a midweek obliteration of Manawatu to ensure his availability.
Peel, though, was ultimately ruled fit on the eve of the Test, with English World Cup winner Matt Dawson backing him up from the bench.
'It didn't really matter for me,' Cusiter says. 'I just loved the experience, playing with all of those guys. That was everything for me.
'I think at that time, I was 23, and I thought all being well, I could get on another one or maybe even another two if I continued to play well. But y'know, for me, life didn't work out that way. That was my only tour.
'I never thought I'd get to that level in the first place', says Cusiter, who these days runs an alcohol retail business in California, where he moved shortly after finishing his career with Sale Sharks in 2016.
'I'm extremely proud looking back 20 years later that I had that experience of touring with the Lions, which is a very rare thing.
'I remember seeing a few guys in the years since talking about how disappointed they were in the whole experience. I don't feel like that at all. I have nothing but fond memories.'
Time has been a healer for Owen — director of rugby at Hailebury College in Hertfordshire, England, for the last 12 years — who these days views the summer of 2005 through the same lens as his one-time teammate.
'Now, I just think, 'Wow. How amazing is it to have gone on a Lions tour? How amazing is it to have been a part of this thing?'' he says.
'I retired earlier than I wanted to and if you had said to me when I was 18, 'This is what you're going to do in your career,' I would have been like…' Owen pauses for a second, then breaks into a laugh. ''Thank you!''
'I can still say that I played in six or seven matches for the Lions, which is pretty special. I'll take it.'