Carrying on as planned – What's next for the Lions Tour
British and Irish Lions MD, Ben Calveley, says the tour will go on as originally planned
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In some ways the events in the Lions camp over these past 24 hours felt somewhat inevitable.
It all began with a routine round of lateral flow testing that saw a member of the management team test positive. Two more members of the management staff and two players subsequently were identified as close contacts and were put into self-isolation.
All members of the touring party then had PCR tests which saw a player test positive. Six more players and then a further two staff members were then sent to their hotel rooms and the rest of the party went to the Emirates Airline Park in order to take on the Cell C Sharks.
Despite numerous changes to the original side, what followed was an extremely dominant performance from the Lions, who overcame the Sharks 7-54 in Johannesburg. Lions Managing Director, Ben Calveley, fronted up to media prior to the game, revealing that not all of the travelling party are fully vaccinated, but that last nights was allowed to go ahead after being cleared by their Medical Advisory Group.
In the hours that have followed, Calveley has today revealed that the player who tested positive has since tested negative, his positive a ‘single gene positive’ meaning that it was a very low level positive.
That same player will be tested again tomorrow and should that test be negative, then he and the close contacts will be released back to the Lions population, whilst the member of staff will have to see out their isolation, remaining behind in Guanteng.
It was Guanteng, where the Lions are currently in camp, that was described as the epicentre of the pandemic in South Africa the night that the Lions headed to the Southern Hemisphere, Calveley bullish as it was suggested that camping the team in that area was perhaps not the correct thing to have done.
“I wouldn’t say (that suggestion) is a fair representation of the situation,” Calveley said on Thursday afternoon. “Largely because we are in a bio-secure bubble here, so we are protected as much as we can be, because there is nobody coming in and out of our facility.
“We have the players, we have the management team, we have the hotel staff, but everyone here lives in the bubble. Nobody comes and goes, the hotel staff don’t go home in the evening and then reintegrate the next day, they live onsite here as well and there are very few hotel staff.
“So, actually, our bubble is about as secure as it can be and what you don’t want to do is bring risk into the camp by having more time spent travelling around the country. The more times you travel, the more opportunity there is for Covid to be introduced into the camp via somebody that is outside of that bubble environment.”
There was already likely to have been a worst-case scenario written down by the Lions hierarchy, and whether we have quite got to that point is still uncertain, but so far the Springboks having cancelled their second test against Georgia after more Covid cases cropped up in their camp, whilst the Lions’ encounter with the Bulls on Saturday was cancelled for a similar reason.
We saw in late 2020 how England Cricket abandoned their tour of South Africa after serious concerns surrounding the Proteas’ bio-secure bubble. This came after the hosts held a braai upon arrival at their hotel, instead of isolating in their rooms awaiting test results.
Subsequently players began to test positive and the plug was pulled on the tour. This was partly due to the success of the bubbles in the UK the summer prior, but for now the Lions tour remains on course to end with the test series.
Warren Gatland even hypothesised in his post-match press conference last night that perhaps Covid-19 got into his camp through hotel staff, but for now that is all pure speculation and the team will not be having a week without a game, the Sharks remaining in Johannesburg in order to play the Lions for a second time in four days.
“They are the only side in the country that is able to meet really strict protocols that exist,” Calveley said. “That’s because they have already been living in a bubble, and in terms of playing that number of games in a short period of time, that applies to us as well.
“From our side, we have an absolutely fantastic strength and conditioning team in place here. They work extremely closely with the coaches and if there was any doubt from a player welfare standpoint that the game shouldn’t proceed it wouldn’t be happening.”
It was this statement that hasn’t sat easy. Yes, the Lions are playing back to back matches, Josh Adams having played twice in the past 12 days or so, but the Sharks are a different kettle of fish entirely.
A much smaller group of players, it will be a tough ask for the players, players who will be doubling up against a potentially all-new group of Lions. Whether it is to fulfil television agreements or to prevent some loss of revenue, Calveley continued to say that what the Lions are calling ‘Plan B’ was arranged through the South Africa Rugby Union as his focus has been on the Lions.
What was a constant yesterday was the comment that the tour should have been hosted in the UK and Ireland, where in contrast to South Africa, is relatively open. At Wembley for England’s semi-final against Denmark in the Euros, 67,000 were present to watch England make their first final in 55 years.
When suggested to the MD earlier on, he was firm in his stance that the tour would be carrying on as planned.
“It is certainly not as simple as hopping on a flight and playing the series out on British soil,” Calveley said. “We are very much taking it one step at a time, we deal with the challenges as they arise, we make the decisions one day at a time.
“The focus today has been on the rearranged Sharks fixture for the weekend. We then get on a plane on Sunday and travel to Cape Town, where we have more fixtures and there are no plans to do anything different to that.”
