Only time will tell what effect this bad dress rehearsal will have on the performance in the First Test in a month’s time. In the immediate aftermath, however, Andy Farrell couldn’t disguise the hurt and disappointment he felt in himself and his team after his first game as head coach ended in a 28-24 loss to Argentina.
“Honestly, losing hurts, especially in this jersey,” said Farrell. “So, we need to find the solutions pretty quickly and be honest with ourselves. There has to be some good to come from this.”
Farrell admitted his own performance was “obviously not good enough” and added: “I always take full responsibility, that’s my role. It doesn’t matter what department or whatever, I’m in charge of the job lot, so it obviously wasn’t good enough and I need to be better.”
“Obviously the first and appropriate thing to say is congratulations to Argentina, they thoroughly deserved to win the Test match. They capitalised very well on the back of quite a few errors from us. Congratulations to them. I’m sure that’s a big moment in Argentinian history."
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It’s true that the Lions were a makeshift selection drawn from four countries at relatively short notice and were without 14 of their 38-man squad due to club commitments and injuries. At least the injured players are on the mend in advance of their Saturday-morning long-haul trek to Perth.
But Farrell wasn’t making any allowances for any of that.
“Oh no, I wouldn’t give that excuse. We need to do better than that. It is what it is.
“The Lions players, good players coming together, of course we ask a lot of them, and maybe we put too much pressure on the side because it certainly looked like we was a little bit disconnected at times.
“Look, we’ll review what we said we were going to own, and then we need to make sure that we get something positive from that because it’s all about how we move forward.
“You can try to throw it all around and say we had plenty of opportunities and we should have done better to convert that, but the whole story of the game is that we compounded too many errors. In the end, we weren’t able to put the pace on the game because of that.”
Farrell expects to see a response from his wounded Lions - and in many areas as, save for the scrums, they were beaten in the air and on the ground, their line-out malfunctioned and, by his own admission, the Lions’ attack was clunky.
“You can single out one thing but it’s not just one thing, it’s a compounding of quite a few bits. The amount of balls that we threw blindly, either to the opposition or the floor, is probably a stand-out.
“If you combine that with the kicking game and the aerial battle and what is disappointing is scraps on the floor from that type of battle. It always seemed to go to Argentina so there’s a bit of fight and hunger from them that we can’t accept.
“Then you combine stuff at the breakdown, the lineout or whatever, and it’s too much. It’s too much when it all comes together, it’s just compounded, and there’s a reason why people do get cramp or look a bit tired or are not able to capitalise on opportunities you have created, because, probably subconsciously, you’re suppressing yourself with the compounding of errors. It obviously needs to be addressed.”
The Pumas looked what they are, more of a team and one ranked fifth in the world. But even so, they hadn’t played in seven months, have no national professional league of their own, were missing several front-liners involved in the French play-offs and were drawn from all over the world at a week’s notice with several newcomers.
“I think the guys were fantastic,” said their head coach Felipe Contepomi. “We had a really good week in training but also in believing. Believe it or not the weather helped a lot because the guys could drink mate on the terrace in St Helen’s in the Radisson Blu.
“So, we had a very good week and then those 80 minutes is just about expressing yourself, trying to do what we said we were going to do and it wasn’t perfect. We know there is a lot to improve but I’m so proud for the 23, but more so for the 32 that work here this week because how they behaved the whole week was unbelievable.”
Their wonderful match-wining try finished by their released Connacht utility back Santiago Cordero was testament to Contepomi’s mantra about expressing themselves, and was initiated by the outstanding Tomas Albornoz in a manner not dissimilar to Contepomi instigating Leinster’s famous pitch-length try against Toulouse in 2006.
Putting this historic win into perspective, Contepomi said: “Well, you know it’s kind of a one-off. It’s an invitational game and the last time was 20 years ago and we just couldn’t beat them. We drew,” he said of the 25-all draw against the Lions in Cardiff in 2005.
“Coming here 20 years later I think it’s incredible. We don’t know if we’ll ever again be invited or not to play a game like that but definitely for everyone who has been involved in this week it will be memorable.”
“I know how special it is for an Irish, Scottish, Welsh or English player to be a Lion and for us to play against the best of the best in these islands, it’s nearly a dream.
“And I wouldn’t say even having a win because we could have lost that game. We won it, putting in that performance after two days, for me I take my hat off to the boys.”
As a former Leinster assistant coach who worked with a number of their dozen players in this Lions squad, Contepomi said: “It’s great to see that they are there and I am proud for them. Obviously we took a bit of an opportunity also because I know they will be much better in one month’s time when they’ll play Australia.
“They’ll be an awesome team because they have so much quality in there but they had a few training sessions, there was a bit of incohesion and we took our chances.”
