Writing in The Guardian, Martin Kelner argues that a new documentary confirms that the Lions in 1971 really were years ahead of their time.
"Skinner and Baddiel used to do a bit on their Fantasy Football show, of blessed memory, where they played a newsreel clip of some ancient FA Cup final, consisting of a few seconds of staccato action punctuated by frequent cutaways of cheering chaps in flat caps (up until 1955 it was illegal to try to enter Wembley without a flat cap), wielding those huge old wooden-pronged rattles, which often boasted more teeth than the wielders – and usually less yellow too.
"The feature, as I recall, was called Old Football Is Rubbish, a proposition it was impossible to argue with on the basis of the evidence provided. You would not say similar about old rugby union, though, not in a week when the most enjoyable action by some distance was 40 years old. BBC Wales's elegiac memoir of the British and Irish Lions' triumphant 1971 tour of New Zealand, written and presented by my colleague Eddie Butler, acted as a delightful counterpoint to a less than vintage World Cup (I lost count of the number of times commentator Nick Mullins told us "It's not pretty," the final one appearing 10 minutes from the end of yesterday's final).
"The footage from provincial matches on the 1971 tour, generous chunks of which appeared alongside more familiar sequences from the four Test matches against the All Blacks, was pretty, but did make one wonder whether those magical black and white images of Barry John, Gareth Edwards, Mike Gibson, Gerald Davies et al in full attacking flow were just the television equivalent of what Barbra Streisand called "misty water-coloured memories" (not referring to the Lions' tour, as it happens, but to some stuff with Robert Redford in the film The Way We Were)."
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