The Road Back

A home record of eight from nine tells you a side is strong somewhere. It does not tell you a side is good. The question that separates a Shield from a play-off place is what happens when the altitude is gone and the crowd belongs to somebody else.

The Lions started badly. The September tour produced three defeats, and the early narrative of the season wrote itself: formidable in Johannesburg, fragile everywhere else. It is a reputation South African URC sides have worked hard to shed and it is not an unfair one.

What changed was not dramatic and it did not arrive all at once. Across the second half of the campaign the Lions became a side that took something from matches they had previously lost outright — the three losing bonus points in the final record are, in their unglamorous way, part of the evidence. Nine try bonus points say the attack travelled. Three losing bonus points say the side did not fold when the attack was not enough.

The clearest demonstration came in Europe, in a competition that ended in disappointment. In Perpignan, in a winner-takes-all pool match, the Lions led 20-10 entering the final quarter away from home. They did not close it out and the campaign ended there. But a Lions side that goes to the south of France and leads with fifteen minutes left is a different animal from the one that lost in Parma in September.

The quarter-final in Dublin was the last word. Leinster at home in a URC knockout is as difficult a fixture as the competition offers, and the eventual champions won it. The Lions were there, which four previous campaigns had not managed.

Away form remains the honest gap in this squad, and the coaching group would say so first. Pool 2 in 2026/27 sends them to La Rochelle and to Saracens. That is where the next chapter of this page gets written.