The odds, as we know, are stacked heavily against the British & Irish Lions on this tour and one of the reasons for that will stand tragically empty and obsolete when the Lions arrive in Christchurch tomorrow.
On every Lions tour to New Zealand since 1930, there has been a Test match at Lancaster Park; 2017 will be the exception. This time round, the Test series starts in Auckland, goes south to Wellington and then returns to Auckland for the third Test.
As an itinerary, therefore, the business end of this tour is unimaginative and ignores the south island. In terms of influence over the final outcome, it weighs heavily against the tourists. Auckland’s Eden Park is very much home for the All Blacks, and they have not lost a Test match there since 1994. There is no other venue in world rugby that so heavily favours the home side, maybe nowhere else in world sport.
Yet tomorrow the Lions will arrive for their sole visit to Christchurch and the reminders of the earthquake that devastated the city six years and four months ago will still be all around them.
Three years ago, when the England team were on tour, they stopped off there. All were astonished by how slow the reconstruction process had been. Vast suburbs remained deserted, cordoned-off danger zones. In the centre of town, Cathedral Square looked as if the earthquake had happened only yesterday. The heart bled for a city still suffering from such destruction.
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Not far out of town, Lancaster Park stood desolate and broken. An old-style Kiwi oval that was home to Test rugby and cricket for nearly a century had been only four miles from the epicentre of the earthquake. Now the ground was ruptured, the grass grew long, the whole stadium was a no-go zone, the stands stood crumbled and unkempt, all apart from the Hadlee Stand, which had been so rocked by the tremors that it had to be flattened almost immediately. In front of the ground, the old war memorial gates, built to commemorate the Canterbury athletes who served in the First World War, were still standing, still padlocked shut.
Three years on, the centre of town has started to make some progress. At Lancaster Park, though, those gates remain chained; nothing has changed apart from the grass and the weeds, which are higher. Since the earthquake struck on February 22, 2011, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale and taking 185 lives with it, this place has remained almost completely untouched.
So the Lions could not have played a Test match in Christchurch because there is no Test venue. On Saturday, they play the Crusaders at the AMI Stadium, which is neat with its 18,000 capacity but too small for a Test. Even if it could cater for more, the city would struggle with the sudden influx of 20,000-plus visitors.
The tour will get a taste of Christchurch, then, but not the full meal. The city was once proud, cultural, a fine place to host a proper Lions stop. One hopes that it will one day be all those things again. It would certainly benefit from the economic boost of a Lions Test. It would be a fine thing indeed if the Lions could come back here in 12 years’ time and play the first Test — as they have before.
However, put that suggestion to Hamish Riach, chief executive of the Crusaders and the Canterbury RFU, and he will give you little confidence that this will be the case. He would love it to be, of course, but he does not control the future.
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The essential problem is that Canterbury Rugby never owned Lancaster Park. Nor did Canterbury Cricket, mind. The ground was, and still is, owned by the city council and, as with much of the broken city, it lay dormant while the council fought various insurance companies for recompense.
As priorities go, the sports stadium was never high on the list — which was fair enough. Hospitals, running water, electricity, roofs over heads and all that. But we are six years on.
The status quo is as follows: the city has finally settled its insurance claims, it did not get as much for Lancaster Park as had been hoped, but at least it can move on. At the end of the year, finally, the bulldozers will demolish it. And it will not be rebuilt. Every survey says that the costs to rebuild on damaged foundations are way out of reach.
At some point, Lancaster Park will be a community sports facility but it will never again be the home to epic occasions that come with world-class international sport.
The issue is how much money the council is prepared to invest in its replacement or, more to the point, whether it envisages a city that can again host Lions Test matches, or something more modest. Riach is clearly concerned that it will be the latter.
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“Do they have the ambition for Christchurch?” he asks. “Or do they see a different Christchurch that doesn’t have the vibrancy?”
In a country where rugby means so much, Christchurch and Canterbury are the centre of it. You would have thought, then, that the sport and the government would push hard for it to be returned to former glories. Rugby is important for the population; a proper Test venue is important for the local economy, too.
In the Lions context, this is an easy argument to make: the All Blacks have won all but one of the nine Tests played here. No matter the winner, what a celebration that would be if, in
12 years’ time, they could stage a tenth.
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