Lions vs Western Force review. Are we heading for a strong midweek side? Plus, Tomos Williams' injury

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1:35Will Kelleher: Welcome along to The Ruck, the journalist's rugby podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times, coming to you from the lobby of Will Kelleher, Alex Lowe and Stephen Jones, following the Lions' comprehensive 54-7 victory against the Western Force. We have decamped back into the lobby. Where do we want to start with that? Lions get the job done. Steve, they did what they needed to do today in terms of getting a win, first of all, and also an improved performance off the back of Argentina. Sorry, I'm too tired. I can't think of anything. There was a time today where I thought, blimey, this is really going downhill.

2:14They weren't at all good in the first half. And even players like James Lowe was completely off his game. They did come back and, you know, they ran up 50 points, which is never bad. I don't think they ever played brilliantly. Maybe they played really well for a period of 10 minutes in the second half.

2:34Will Kelleher: But that was it. I agree that at halftime and at the early part of the second half, I was thinking, what's the storyline going to be here then if this isn't as comprehensive? If we continue to see the defensive lapses and the ill discipline that we saw in the first half, they were much better in the second half, Alex. was that a natural teething problem? Was it a natural part of a Lions tour that actually they don't necessarily look that great but they were better in the second half they've got the comprehensive win they move on to Wednesday?

3:02Alex Lowe: Yeah I think there's an element too of they were deliberately playing a fast game I think they had the confidence they would outlast Western Force even if it was tight going into the second half and they were able to pull away just much stronger on there, much more depth I thought the discipline defensively in the first half was a problem they were over eager as some of them have put it they conceded too many penalties too quickly which put them under the cosh which ultimately is why Henry Pollock went to the bin about 25 minutes after the warning had been given but they just conceded too many that had to calm down and it did and they'll need greater control greater decision making in those areas I think the shape of their defence still looks like a work in progress they're being they're too easy to pick open attack wise I was I thought it was much more encouraging you can see the identity of of the rugby that Andy Farrell wants his Lions team to play and the accuracy and what the thing that frustrated him against Argentina was blind passes pullback passes without without looking offloads without looking I thought tonight the the fluidity of their attack their support play was outstanding and that maybe maybe therefore there's better communication certainly greater awareness but I thought that their ability to keep the ball alive to get some flow into their attack we saw that in some of the blistering tries they scored there's an identity about the way this team wants to play with the ball that's coming through it was without the ball where the problems lay defensively and at restarts.

4:37Alfie Reynolds: Yeah, the phrase that Andy Farrell used at the end was we were a bit desperate and that's a bit of an Andy Farrellism.

4:44Alex Lowe: And he had said in the week, we can't be desperate. He literally said, he literally used that word when he named the team. We have to be on it but we can't be desperate. And then after the game he said, we were too desperate.

4:55Alfie Reynolds: And I think he was particularly referring to they were nibbling too much at the breakdown and he sort of balked at the suggestion that they got on the wrong side of Ben O 'Keefe because he felt that Dan Sheehan dealt with the referee very well, but it's correct to say that they got penalised heavily by Ben O 'Keefe. It was about five penalties in the space of 10, 15 minutes at the start, and they calmed it down a bit. And then Henry Pollock got yellow carded because they were basically on a team warning for most of that first half, weren't they? And he was the one that put his hand in the cookie jar and got caught.

5:24Alfie Reynolds: But there was more to be a bit more excited about. They should have won by about that margin and did, so fair play. And they've got their first win on tour. They've got their tour song underway. We've learnt they've got a new song to the tune of Status Quo's Rocking All Over The World that Finn Smith's written the lyrics to. So they're up and away with the tour song. They haven't told us the lyrics, though, have they? No, I think Joe McCarthy was telling us afterwards that they all had to be reading them off their phones because they weren't sure of exactly what the lyrics were. That's always better than Status Quo's version.

5:57Alex Lowe: They were a little bit coy. You and I, Alfie, spoke to Olly Chesson. He was a bit coy about it. Maybe it's because it's only just been written, I think. They don't know it yet. But music and Lions tours are synonymous. It would be great, I think, if the song did get out there and by the end of this tour you've got Lions fans singing it because we've had...

6:18Alfie Reynolds: Lions all over the world.

6:20Alex Lowe: I don't know, I like that idea of it bonding everyone together. The Maratoji song in 17.

6:26Alfie Reynolds: Wonderwall. Wonderwall in 97.

6:29Alex Lowe: The choir they had that Gatlin put together among the squad. Like, music and lines. Sloop John B was 1971.

6:35Will Kelleher: There you go. What was the one from 2005, which did not catch John? Oh, well, the Power 4, yeah. The Power 4, yeah. Less said about that one. No one knew the lyrics to that one, yeah. Steve, from an attacking point of view, which Alex mentions was much better today, are we surprised at how they're attacking? Because I got the impression from Andy Farrell after Argentina when he complained about the offloads that he was like, this is not part of the plan. There are 23 offloads today. It's actually a pretty ambitious attacking game we're seeing. Yeah, Alex is right in saying that the attack, they got better second half.

7:04But also, what was also better by a mile was the scrummaging. And the attack's always better if you're scrummaging well. Tide Furlong just does not look himself at all. And when Will Stewart came on, the scrum was transformed. So I think there was a lot to do with that. But I think they're just finding themselves with it in attack, as Alex says. and I think they are really building something. I think they're buying into it. I think Elliot Daly is playing unbelievably well and one of the two others, I thought Ringrose played well. I thought Ringrose is now in my test team rather than Bundyaki and I think they are becoming a really decent attack inside.

7:43Alfie Reynolds: The one thing that we flagged from quite a way out and I remember us talking about this when we picked our squad before Andy Farrell did is it still feels like there's a lack of flat out gas and pace but on the flip side, the times where they did get a turnover ball, they did finish it off quite nicely with neat passes

8:00Alex Lowe: they're sort of making up for it with their support running

8:02Alfie Reynolds: and like sort of clever interplay rather than someone just putting the hammer down

8:06Alex Lowe: and there was no sense of panic about it there was a lot of one-handed offloads over the top, a couple of times I think Thomas Williams' first try was a good example where the ball carrier goes down and he had support runners on his shoulder on both sides, so the pop-up pass off the floor could have gone left all right the Thomas Williams second try is probably an even better example of they get the turnover they go 90 and and it was just a beautifully fluid interplay but there was always somebody there on the shoulder and I thought that was a real hallmark of this performance which perhaps makes up for a lack of straight out gas because if you don't have to beat the man because you know that you already have to do is draw the man because there's going to be someone on on your shoulder that makes a huge difference another thing I think

8:49Alfie Reynolds: that needs a tidy up which is like natural they've only just got together they've had a couple of weeks of training is they're quite dog leggy in defense like nick white was playing with them a little bit around the edges of the line out like someone would shoot out often it was dan sheehan and he'd just get picked off quite a lot and they'd make a lot of yards around that kind of edge of the line out so and there's some guys who are shooting out in the line as well and getting picked off with a little pass so it seems like they're trying to sort of blitz a bit but because they don't know each other that well they're kind of yeah it's not quite I mean even in the Argentina

9:22Alex Lowe: game for that beautiful try that the Pumas scored from deep Curry flew out and Pollock didn't move at the same speed and then you know those two would know each other there's just only for like one England game probably but there's there's an element of the I think finding their their organisation defensively but you have you know these games are thick and fast now it's you know Saturday today Wednesday in Brisbane next Saturday in New South Wales these improvements will only will come I think more quickly from playing and from having real real life examples of where it's gone wrong to correct.

9:59Will Kelleher: There's a couple of individual players that I want to mention Steve where was Matt Hansen in in your list of players that impressed you Andy Farrell interestingly in the press conference said by an absolute country mile, Mac Hanson was the best player on that pitch. So he was pretty happy with what he saw from the winger. Yeah, he was. Look, I got one positive, one negative. One positive is Mac Hanson. And he actually looks a lot better player than I ever thought he was today. I've always rated low, higher there. But he had a tremendous game today. He was alert. A couple of times he got back to field long kicks and was on his own and managed to hold him up till people got behind him.

10:35I think he's tremendous. What a battle between him and Tommy Freeman to be on the wing. On the converse side, they've got a joke player there in Pollock. As Alex said, he was the one whose turn it was to concede. So he got binned. He made two horrendous errors. One when he passed it over someone's head into In Touch. The man is not a big man. He's quick. He's not big. He's a liability. He shouldn't be on the tour. And today he was a joke. I completely and utterly disagree with that.

11:09Alfie Reynolds: I think Pollock was... I found it fascinating watching him. He's at the centre of everything. You can't take your eyes off it. We were watching... Sorry, writing for the live blog. He can't take his eyes off him. I found it interesting. I found it fascinating watching him because he's at the centre of things. He's won two with Josh van der Vlijs, set up the first Thomas Williams try, really clever. I love Pollock. I'm going to completely disagree with you there, Steve. I know you've done lots of these trips. Because he is not remotely a liar and he's not an international player. It's way too early to just kind of say you don't rate him after seeing him three times.

11:42Alfie Reynolds: Sorry, hang on. What do you mean I don't rate him? He should never have been anywhere near. He should never have been anywhere near. You know my thoughts. Steve Borthwick finally agreed with me and left him out. Alex, play referee here.

11:56Alex Lowe: I thought there were moments that showed his rawness. The pass over James Lowe's head. Was it James Lowe? I think it was James Lowe at the back.

12:03Will Kelleher: Yeah, yeah.

12:03Alex Lowe: Where he looked incredibly relaxed as he ran back and picked up a tricky bouncing ball in Coffin Corner. I thought that was really composed and calm. And then he almost panicked and threw the ball over James O's head. That's the kind of thing that will get him out of a test team. However, his other contributions are exactly why he's in the test squad frame. Because he makes things happen. But the try that Thomas Williams scored where he made the break and the interplay to make that break, yes, he was at the heart of a scrap early on. But I don't mind that particularly. Great. Have a bit of character.

12:43If you're Martin Johnson, you can do that. If you're him, you know that he's so small that no one's going to hit him.

12:51Alex Lowe: He may not have even had a conversation with Joe McCarthy on this trip because there's so many players. The moment a Western Force player laid a finger on him, Joe McCarthy was flying in. I just think those are moments on a line that would actually help fast-track things. Just because he's a poor player, you're not going to... He's not a poor player. He's a terrible player. He's terrible. He's a jack-in-the-box player who can make things happen. What is a jack-in-the-box player? What does that mean? He's providing us all the energy. He's as much a British line as my grandmother. We might have to move on here.

13:24Alex Lowe: I think we're never going to agree on this. I thought he had... There are still moments in his game which shows his rawness, which might count him out ultimately. Why would he bring someone who's raw on a Lions tour, Alex? Because he also makes things happen. He had a key role in two of the tries that were scored today. Well, he almost conceded two, and he could easily have lost the try that they did score by reversing the penalty. Let the boy play.

13:49Will Kelleher: Yeah, I mean, I personally like Pollock. I think at the moment I'd still have Conan as my test eight, and I feel like it's Pollock and Earl playing for a bench spot because they've got more versatility and kind of dynamism to come off it.

14:00Alex Lowe: I think that's where we're heading, which we'll chat about in a minute.

14:03Will Kelleher: The other player that I did want to mention there was actually Joe McCarthy who got the official Player of the Match award. And in particular, in regards to Joe McCarthy, do we think we're looking at now a Toje as the second row with one of the beefier second rows in behind him, which is opening up a Chessam or a Byrne at six? Do we think that's where Andy Farrell's mind is?

14:23Alex Lowe: I think that's the way that this is starting to shape up. And I guess this goes to the team announcement for this game, which didn't have Mauro Toji in it, which raised the first question of Andy Farrell at the press was, where's your captain? Why is the captain not playing this game? He played Saturday to Saturday. I couldn't find precedent for the captain being rested this early in a tour. Admittedly, most tours start Saturday, Wednesday or Saturday, Tuesday. But the more I looked into it, In 2009, Paul O 'Connell played Saturday, Saturday, Wednesday, and then had 10 days prepped for the first test.

14:58Alex Lowe: Lions captain, 10 days, went from Wednesday to the first test. The more, and I wrote that in the team piece, and the more you look at it, and the more you see the way the selections are unfolding, it's starting to feel like our theory that he would be building a team to play, say, two Saturdays out from the first test, is actually he's targeting the Wednesday games for his test team. And part of the theory for that is that this Wednesday they play Queensland Reds, the Wednesday after they play ACT Brumbies, who are the two strongest Australian teams, the Saturday games are the Waratahs, and then a scratch, invitational Aussie-New Zealand team.

15:35Alex Lowe: If he targets the Wednesdays, they play the two stronger games, and then we'll have 10 days build-up. So he's also trying to get everyone to start. So Chesson will start, all things being equal, against Queensland Reds on Wednesday. And I would imagine he would start alongside James Ryan, because he's the only other lock who hasn't had a start. I would imagine Marrow would be on the bench. The only thing could be that Marrow starts, Chesson starts at six. Yeah, like the third day. But it feels to me like they are angling for a big lad alongside Marrow with a line-out six. and then that puts Conan at eight who will also make his first start on Wednesday and maybe a Curry or a Morgan to play seven.

16:19Alfie Reynolds: So Alex and I were just putting down what we thought is the probable team for the Reds and depending on when you listen to this you might have already seen it because it's out on Monday. We're rattling on this tour very quickly because the early theme seems to be that the bench guys then start largely on block in the next game And we've only had two match squads of evidence, but everything about the Lions is making it up as you go along and kind of finding little ways they're doing things. So here's a probable team for the Reds, based on that theory, I guess. So Andrew Porter, Ronan Kelleher, Will Stewart.

16:55Alfie Reynolds: As Alex has just said, do you start Otoji or do you start Ryan, one of those, with Oli Chessom? Then maybe Curry at six, Morgan at seven, Conan at eight. With then Gibson Park first start, they've been determined that he's fit and he's been training for the last week or so after his glute strain so he should be starting at nine with finn smith at 10 most likely and then aki and hugh jones the centers with duan van der merver tommy freeman then hugo keenan first start at fullback and i mean we keep saying this about these teams but that looks sort of halfway there to a test team but i guess that there are elements of today that look halfway there to a test team too so it's going to be interesting how it all shakes out.

17:36I haven't got any no revision on my view that the Lions are really struggling to be top class Conan is not a great Lions number 8, he's not a Mervyn Davis or Ken Goodall is he? And I think they've really got to rush it now. McCarthy I wouldn't have made mad at the match and also if you speak to the Irish hacks they think he didn't actually come on in the last year he could be one of the all time greats and could leave leave Australia as an all-time great. But some of these guys have really, really got to come through rapidly because at the moment they're not a great side.

18:12Will Kelleher: Which I suppose gets to the heart of conversations that we've had previously. When you look at this Lions squad, Steve, it doesn't look like an absolute classic on paper and they could become that. But if you compare it with 2017, for example, where you've got Warburton, Alan Wynn, Sexton, John Davies, like so many great players, it feels like this squad maybe isn't quite there yet.

18:31Alex Lowe: Yeah, I was chatting to someone earlier, there's a little bit of a comparison with 1989, when the Lions came here in 1989. There hadn't been a tour in 1986, it was a one-off game. So it was a squad in 1989 with very few players who'd made their name on a Lions tour. There were a lot of first-time Lions. This squad, you know, there wasn't a proper tour in 21, there were test matches, but those players who've experienced a full-on Lions tour are very few. Is there three? Yeah, daily furlong at Marrow, yeah. But Alex, we knew that Akford, Dooley, Iron Mike and Dean Richards were great players. They didn't have to come on a tour to tell us that, even though they hadn't been on one, because they were already great players.

19:13I mean, they got, Ozzy got, as Bob Dwyer right so rightly said, they got beaten up by a bunch of England coppers. Great, great players. And these guys haven't. I mean, Falato should have been chosen as a number eight, but to compare him with the number eights when he was at his best with the number eights they got on this tour is chalk and cheese

19:33Alex Lowe: so my point was that on that 89 tour a lot of Lions legends were built on that tour because they didn't have it coming in, there's a different age profile this is a much younger squad, if they're going to win and do something down here it'll be because people have created that legend for themselves as a lot of those players did in the Lions context in 89, they're going to have to come and prove themselves down here.

19:57Will Kelleher: Just before we get on to the injury news do we think generally speaking Andy Farrell will be fairly happy with where he is at the moment or do you think he'll have some concerns?

20:04Alfie Reynolds: Some bits he said that himself we asked him you asked him I think that question after the game and he sort of went yeah happy with some bits I think there's still as we've kind of talked about earlier in the pod the kind of defensive dog leg stuff the line out wasn't perfect again they're giving away too many penalties he mentioned the ill discipline and actually now that there's a camera in the dressing room you see him slightly tearing strips off the players at half time and I think he said himself Alex hasn't he that he's really trying to pressurize the players in every game because they need to hit this really elite level as Steve's kind of saying pretty quickly like it all rattles away doesn't it like it's they don't have time and and to be fair to all of them none of them have ever given the excuse of oh we've only just come together they're all going no pressure's on we should be really good quickly I mean Steve you've seen a million

20:52Alex Lowe: of these tours but I think if you put these same group of players in camp for six weeks they wouldn't they wouldn't improve anywhere near as quickly as they will do from playing games every three days and four days because the reason he'll be happy is there are elements that have obviously improved and then the challenge will there is therefore laid down on the next group that they have to raise the bar again because there's no option but to to commit everything to make rapid improvements if you want to get to the level you need to get to to win a test series even against a Wallabies team who aren't a classic Lions opponent on this occasion so I think he'll be he won't be particularly happy with lots of elements of the performance but I think he'll be pretty happy that he's got the best pretty much the best around who will be able to build on it in the way that this group built on the Argentina game.

21:43Will Kelleher: I know I said I'd get onto injuries something else popped into my mind that we have to mention. Restarts. Major issue for the Lions.

21:51Alfie Reynolds: Poor Scott Cummings. It's one of those, isn't it, where you go God, you do two things brilliantly or two things badly on a tour like this and it sort of cements an idea in someone's head about how you're doing. So you go...

22:04Alex Lowe: The Wallabies in camp were all watching this game together and one Joseph Suwali would have been watching the Lions restarts and rubbing his hands together in glee because everyone will recall what he did to England's restarts, beating Mauro Toji in the air time and time again. Setting up the final winning try with one. That took him last November. So, the restart nowadays is, they call it like the third set piece. It requires a unit to be in sync and they were horribly out of sync today.

22:34Will Kelleher: Well, Oli Chesson was quite interesting on it afterwards because he said the same in that he said to me, I think people don't quite realise how difficult it is particularly how the laws are these days and wingers or Sueli, whoever it is, getting up and trying to bat the ball back. I mean, Steve, that's something they have to fix, isn't it? And also something that, with the quality of players they have, surely is quite fixable. Yeah, it's one of the most fixable things in the game when they're not going right. I mean, if your scrum's bad, there's not much you can do about it. But you can. And also with Marrow, I mean, it was just brain dead that they kept on doing something which Australia were reading.

23:10So, I mean, you can fix restarts. unless you're really poor. If you're not dexterous enough, maybe. But Sui Lee was a one-off there. I hadn't been seen playing restarts like that before, and I wouldn't be worried about them. I think they'll be okay. They'll be all right with restarts.

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26:23Will Kelleher: Injury news. Thomas Williams, who was having a great game. It happens every talk. We don't know at this stage when we're recording how bad it is. So there's a possibility that by the time you hear this, that there may have been an update.

26:34Alex Lowe: I don't think it matters how bad it is, as Will will say.

26:37Alfie Reynolds: Right, here we go. Do we want the... So, yeah, well, let's quickly do the sort of admin of it. I mean, lots of people will have seen it, but you just felt for Thomas Williams completely, didn't you, right from the start, because he scored a lovely try. And as he was scoring it, clutched the hamstring. And we saw him, Alex Potter off, ice pack on the left hamstring. but immediately us in the press box were hammering away at our keyboards, looking up flight details and everything else, because our theory is that Ben White needs to be here immediately. So Ben White, the Toulon and Scotland scrum half, is currently in Auckland.

27:12Alfie Reynolds: They landed on Friday, because Scotland are playing the Maori All Blacks next Saturday, and then they're playing Fiji and Samoa. So he's actually, as we are sitting here now, closer to Brisbane than the Lions themselves are, because he's a three-hour flight away and we're four or five hours away and flying from Perth to Brisbane on Sunday. So he would probably be the next cab off the rank anyway. Jack Van Portfleet was in training in Dublin when Ben White was playing for Toulon in the playoffs. So I would get him on the phone immediately.

27:46Alex Lowe: Jack Van Portfleet is about 30 hours away in Argentina. The reason that it would be staggering if Ben White isn't called up to be in a squad for the Wednesday game is because they would therefore go into that game with Jonathan Gibson Park playing his first game of the tour. They're confident he's fit, but they'd only have two nines in the squad. There's no way that Thomas Williams will be fit in time for Wednesday. So you go into a game where if someone gets a bang in the warm-up, Marcus Smith is covering Scrum Half for the Lions.

28:18Alfie Reynolds: And already Mitchell's played in both games, so you don't really want him to keep playing every time.

28:23Alex Lowe: So I think, given that he's only across the ditch in New Zealand, it would be madness not to bring him in. Because if it turns out that Thomas Williams just did have horrible cramp, there's nothing lost. Yeah, Ben just goes back to Scotland camp on Thursday or something. So I would be amazed if by Sunday night, Australia time, or certainly Monday morning, they haven't called up Ben White from Scotland. It just reminds you of the great old Lions traditions where you could only replace someone if the first person had gone home. So if you wanted to bring someone in, the other person was excluded.

29:00Like Wade Dooley went home for his father's funeral and they wouldn't let him come back. So it's just amazing what they used to do.

29:07Alfie Reynolds: It's brutal too. It was actually a bit that we didn't end up using on the pod series, The Red Lions, out now, wherever you get your podcasts. But Adam Jones, that incident where he got his shoulder dislocated by Bacchys Bota. He wanted to stay for the third test, but they said, no, you've got to go home. In 2009. In 2009, yeah. So he was back at the Ospreys watching that third test, the Lions 1, going, I've just done the whole tour and I'm not allowed. So you feel, look, we may be pre-empting this slightly, but if Thomas Williams is ruled out the tour, that is so unfortunate and such a horrible blow because he's been playing well.

29:39Alfie Reynolds: He's had an amazing season, Premiership Player of the Year. He's been one of the better Welsh players in a desperate Wales team who've lost 17 times in a row, deserves his place on this trip and would have pushed for a test jersey. So horrible for that guy.

29:52Alex Lowe: We don't know the state of it, but if he's not 100 % when he wakes up on Sunday morning, to me, there's no question. Given how close Ben White is, they should bring him in.

30:02Alfie Reynolds: It would actually be foolish not to.

30:05Alex Lowe: Unless they're really confident in Marcus Smith as a scrum half.

30:08Will Kelleher: Right, let's round it off then. It feels like it's into the tour proper now, isn't it? So we're recording this Saturday night after the game. Sunday, we're all travelling. Monday Lions team news, Wednesday Reds. It's kind of healthy scathing. We're not going to touch the sides.

30:21Alfie Reynolds: Well, we're going to, I guess, speak to you guys on Monday's pod in Brisbane, then Wednesday after the game, then by this time next week we're going to be in Sydney. I'm going to miss Perth. I like Perth.

30:32Alex Lowe: We're in a hotel with a large chunk of the official tour group. There's a few hundred here who are doing the whole thing. Good effort. What a tour. Which is brilliant, really. There were 40 ,000-odd in the stadium, a lot of expats there today, but the numbers will grow. And the number of red shirts around everywhere. No, it's cool. We are definitely into the thick of it now. The kind of the send-off game and all of that, which I didn't agree with. It couldn't feel more detached from the Lions tour than it does now, looking back on that Dublin game. And, you know, the Lions need to... It's a whole other conversation.

31:06Alex Lowe: The Lions need to ditch that idea straight away because when you get here, you realise this is what a Lions tour is. It's not playing home. I agree with that, Alex, But the only thing is I think that there's another jump to make now because Perth is a rather genteel place and rather laid back. And the crowd had come to, they weren't rabidly in favour of the home team or anything like that. So I think that it needs to be as big a jump as it was between the Irish, the game in Ireland and today, which, as you say, was huge. we need another huge jump now a raucous horrible crowd somewhere to really put the tour on the map I'll tell you what will also be interesting from a media point of view the Ashes coming up in December, January when England come down here to play Test cricket the country is against them oh massive the team are against them the fans are against them the newspapers are against them to the point where it becomes a strategy it becomes we're not going to name Stuart Broad in the paper all of that sort of stuff Pick up the West Australian paper today.

32:09Alex Lowe: There's 40 ,000 people at the game. There's about 400 words of rugby in the paper. If this is going to kind of ignite around the country, then it's going to have to demand more space in the newspapers and in the media. And at the moment, over here in West Australia, we're in the thick of an AFL, Aussie rules state. We're going to Brisbane, which is Aussie rules and rugby league. Then we go to New South Wales, which is a massive rugby league, coming up to the decided state of origin. which is on the day which is on the same day as they play the Brumbies game the Lions tour is awesome and it will build and build and build but it has to command more space in the newspapers over here because 400 words on the day that the Lions launched their tour is just really disappointing but it does show where Rugby Union is in this country

32:56Alfie Reynolds: there was a mild digs from the Western Force PA announcer

33:03Will Kelleher: the PA yeah

33:05Alfie Reynolds: Where if those of you who weren't following our blog or saw our tweets about it or whatever, that he went through the Lions team and it was like the Englishman Elliot Daly. But when he got to the guys that weren't necessarily born in the UK and Ireland, he mentioned where they were from originally. So it was the Australian, Matt Hanson, the other Australian, Sione Tua Pallotu, this former SA schoolboy, now Scottish prop, Pierre Schumann.

33:29Alex Lowe: The Kiwi who's now an Irishman, James Lowe.

33:31Alfie Reynolds: Yeah, so they have realised that that's a hot-button issue and are going to keep mentioning it, I think.

33:37Will Kelleher: And the Lions are going to absolutely love it, aren't they, if that keeps happening, because they'll keep getting asked about it as much as they would like to try and avoid it. And look, maybe we should ask Joe Schmidt

33:43Alfie Reynolds: how many of his team were born in Australia.

33:45Will Kelleher: There you go. There's a conversation for another day. We will leave it there for our post-match pod. Looking back on the Lions' victory over the Western Force, they are up and running here in Australia. Next stop, Brisbane. Monday's pod coming for you as usual. Then they play the Reds. then the New South Wales Waratahs. It doesn't really stop until we get to that first test. Do drop us an email. The email address is theruckatthetimes.co.uk. This has been The Ruck, the journalist rugby podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times.

34:17Alfie Reynolds: This week on The Business Podcast, Chancellor John Healy promised a new age of industrialisation. Is that realistic? Or perhaps just a slogan to get Labour hearts fluttering?

34:27Alex Lowe: We cannot overlook the impact that Chinese imports into the UK economy could have on what are essentially productive businesses. From The Times and The Sunday Times, join me, Hannah Previtt.

34:36Alfie Reynolds: And me, Dominic O 'Connell, for conversations from the world of business and entrepreneurship. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts or find our channel on YouTube by searching Times Business.