Duhan van der Merwe is not an elite winger and should be nowhere near the Lions Test team

Telegraph

02-07-2025

If you were to play a rugby version of Frankenstein and construct your ideal Test winger, the finished product would look something pretty close to Duhan van der Merwe.
At 6ft 4in and close to 17 stone, Van der Merwe has all the physical gifts you could possibly wish for in a wing. Once he hits top end speed, the 30-year-old is like a rubbish truck rolling down the hill without the brakes on. You can try to stop it, but it isn't going to end well for you. No winger has terrorised England so consistently since Jonah Lomu from back in the day.
But like the scarecrow from The Wizard of the Oz, Van der Merwe lacks the crucial commodity in the top two inches to be a genuine elite winger. Earlier this week, the Reds coaches treated the travelling journalists to a couple of cans of Castlemaine XXXX. With little prompting, it seemed they were rubbing their hands at the presence of Van der Merwe on the British and Irish Lions teamsheet. They knew the threats he posed in open field, but they also recognised the opportunities he presented
It is nearly guaranteed that once a match, Van der Merwe will freeze like a computer crashing. A lot of the time, he reboots himself quickly enough to go again. Sometimes he does not.
Against the Reds, Van der Merwe suffered two such moments. The first came when full-back Jock Campbell kicked a dolly of a kick almost straight to him. Van der Merwe had many options, call a mark or choose to initiate a counterattack. Instead he chose precisely the only option that should not have been available to him, let the ball bounce. Somehow he nearly conceded a line-out and was then nearly tackled in his own in-goal area. Ridiculous was followed by the sublime – brutally handing off Lachie Anderson and John Bryant and then offloading to Jamison Gibson-Park. This was peak Duhan.
Alas he did not get out of jail the second time around. Again he was targeted by the Reds kick, this time a dinky little grubber by scrum-half Kalani Thomas. Again he had time to claim it, but this time the blank screen lasted a touch too long and this time Josh Flook nipped in to touch down.
These were far from the only mistakes the Lions committed in Brisbane. The scrum is fast approaching a disaster zone and Will Stuart arguably had a worse individual game, giving up three penalties and running what appeared to be repeated interference lines in the Lions attack. But Van der Merwe's brain fades were more egregious through the prism of Test selection.
Yes, he scored a try – a decent finish which owed a lot more to Jack Conan's excellent hands – but these types of errors will loom large in the review. There was also a moment in the second half when Van der Merwe received the ball in space with just Jeffery Toomaga-Allen, the tighthead prop, in front of him. This would normally be meat and drink – or biltong and rooibos to Van der Merwe – but maybe for the first time in his career, he passed and the attack fizzled out.
A slick Lions move is finished off by Van der Merwe ✅ pic.twitter.com/0r0dX1tK6Y
— Sky Sports Rugby Union (@SkySportsRugby) July 2, 2025
While it did not affect the result against a Reds side who blew themselves out after a physical first quarter, you know Wallabies head coach Joe Schmidt will have already drawn up a PowerPoint presentation on Van der Merwe's positioning under the high ball.
On the wing depth chart, Van der Merwe is way behind James Lowe, Mack Hansen and Tommy Freeman, who despite one or two hairy moments was generally assured on the other wing.
It is possible to make mistakes and still put your hand up for Test selection. Hansen certainly was not blemish-free against the Western Force, but as Lions head coach Andy Farrell pointed out afterwards some of these errors came from working hard enough to get into those positions. It was particularly effusive of his desire to get back to gather Western Force's kick ahead and then chase down his own kick, forcing a knock on.
'The play of the day, I mean, there were some fantastic tries, weren't there? But the play of the day if you want to look what a Lion should do for his team-mates was when Mack Hansen went up and down the field, end-to-end, never gave up, and fought for his team-mate,' Farrell said. 'That's the type of spirit that we want throughout the team. So a nice example there.'
Unfortunately for Van der Merwe, the examples Farrell is likely to be picking out in the team review will not look so glowing in his favour. For all his physical gifts – which could easily win the Lions the series in the manner of George North who is nearly an identical specimen – it is these types of mistakes which could also lose a series too.