There are two months to go until the Lions squad is announced and Warren Gatland already has the careworn air of a man who is spending too much time turning the same set of questions over in his mind.
Gatland likely wakes up wondering about back-row combinations and goes to sleep thinking about injury permutations. On Tuesday night, for a change, Gatland was in Staines overseeing a training session at the local rugby club, a wheeze organised by Land Rover, one of the Lions’ sponsors. He explained he believes “we should do as much as we possibly can to promote the Lions”. So long, that is, as it does not involve giving away anything much of what he’s thinking. The last thing Gatland wants to do is upset the players, press, or rugby public, by giving us a sniff of who he thinks will be in or out.
The one answer Gatland did give was about the proposal to reduce Lions tours from 10 games to eight, as part of the new international calendar. He has said all this before but thinks it is worth repeating. “If you cut the Lions down from 10 games to eight games and we still turn up in New Zealand with no training in the UK or Ireland as a full squad, and limited time in New Zealand before the first match, well, what have you actually achieved?” he asked. “I don’t think you’ve actually achieved anything.”
So whoever makes that decision, Gatland believes, needs to think very carefully about their motivation. “Is it for personal interest? Is it for the betterment of the game and fulfilling the Lions as a tradition and an identity?”
Gatland spent the first weekend of the Six Nations in Edinburgh and Rome, the second in Cardiff and Paris. For a man who used to have a reputation for speaking his mind, he was admirably diplomatic about what he has seen so far. “You look at those top five teams and there is virtually nothing between them apart from England who have had two wins to start off,” he said. “There is still a heck of a lot to play for in the last three games.”
He has not spoken to his Lions coaching team yet – “I have purposely let them concentrate on their own jobs and their own roles and made sure there have been no distractions for them” – but plans to “come together in a few weeks and really start, not finalise, but talk about individuals that have been impressing us”.
The important thing for Gatland is to keep an open mind. “At the moment I am just going and watching games and I haven’t written down a squad.” He expects “someone will come through out of the blue or someone will come through in the last few weeks”.
Asked to name just one player who had impressed him in the past fortnight, he settled on Stuart Hogg. Even then he was quick to add the caveat: “He missed a couple of tackles last week so he will probably be looking at improving some defensive stuff, but in attack he has been pretty good.” At this point, Gatland is not ruling anyone in or out. Especially because there are “a couple of players to come back from injury” and a couple more who “have not played a lot recently”.
One of those would be Dylan Hartley, who finished a six-week ban just before the tournament started, played 55 minutes against France, and 45 minutes against Wales. “He is still getting up to game speed. It is hard to have six weeks off and a break and come into Test match rugby,” Gatland said. “He has done OK and he has got the first game under his belt.” Likewise Johnny Sexton, still waiting for his first start after a recent calf injury.
“I’ve stressed what a quality player Johnny is, he’s got the ability to come back into a side – I think he’s going to be pretty important for Ireland later in the tournament. The last thing I want to do is make a big issue of it. You guys want to create headlines about ‘Will Johnny Sexton miss out?’ because it is a nice story for you.”
Right now, Gatland has already got enough to worry about.
