Llanelli full back Terry Davies, Pontypool prop Ray Prosser and Abertillery flanker Haydn Morgan were joined by legendary Lions lock Rhys Williams and Swansea No 8 John Faull, who died on Wednesday, as the Welsh contingent in one of the touring team’s most famous victories of all time. It was no less than they deserved after pushing the All Blacks so hard in a wonderful series.
But can Sam Warburton’s ‘Class of 2017’ match the feat of those 1959 Lions in winning at Test at Eden Park? The odds are certainly stacked against them!
Whichever way you look at it, the British & Irish Lions are going to be up against it in the first Test against Steve Hansen’s back-to-back world champions this weekend. Defeats against the Blues and Highlanders have already put them on the back foot.
Add in last Friday night’s 78-0 win by the All Blacks over Samoa in their warm-up match for the three-match series, their 37th in a row at the Auckland venue and 46th in a row at home, and the enormity of the task begins to hit home.
You have to go back to France’s 23-20 win on 3 July, 1994, for New Zealand’s last defeat at Eden Park.
Their last home defeat was against the Springboks on 2 September, 2009 in Hamilton, but you have to go even further back into the mists of time for their one and only loss at Eden Park to the Lions.
This weekend’s series opener against the All Blacks will be the 11th between the two teams in Auckland and the 10th at Eden Park, and it is 58 years since the Lions won there.
In fact, that 9-6 fourth test triumph in 1959 is the one and only Lions success in an international in Auckland. The great side of 1971 managed a 14-14 draw to take the series 2-1, but five other defeats have been by margins of 10 or more points.
Eden Park may be a regular graveyard of Lions hopes and dreams, but for one of the survivors from that famous win on 19 September, 1959, it is a venue, and Auckland a city, that remains vivid in his memory.
Terry Davies, the former Llanelli and Wales full back, may be 85 this year, but he, like the other 10 survivors, is still dining out on that victory.
“We scored four tries in the first Test and we still lost the game. Every time they came into our half, Don Clarke kicked a penalty – he got six in the end and we lost 18-17,” recalled Davies.
“Don Clarke was one of the greatest fullbacks of all time. He was a big man and a huge kicker. We certainly had a problem with the referees out there and he made us pay.
“We then scored three tries in the final Test in Auckland and they didn’t score any. It was a great way for us to finish and we felt we deserved something out of the series.”
The ‘Class of 59’ really were a class act, the great entertainers. They averaged 4.52 tries per game in New Zealand with 113 and Tony O’Reilly picked up 17 of them in as many games. If only Warren Gatland’s side had a similar strike rate!
The great England wing Peter Jackson scored the first Lions try to make it 3-3 at half-time before the the greatest try scorer in Lions history, Ireland’s Tony O’Reilly, scored his sixth and final test try for the Lions. Bev Risman then broke through on the blindside of a scrum to make it 9-6 with a third try.
Clarke, who had notched 39 points in the series to date, then had one final kick at goal to try to level the scores. He missed to prove that even he was human.
The crowds flocked to watch the Lions with 801,750 fans attending their games and delivering a £200,000 profit for the New Zealand Rugby Union. That’s worth about £4.3m today!
“That 1959 tour was huge for me. I got injured early on and then had to climb back into the team again. It was magnificent playing for the Lions. It meant you’d reached the top of the ladder,” added Davies.
“It was a very long tour, six months practically, and I had to give up my business to go on the tour. Very few people had any wages out of it. We lived on 10 shillings a day, which is 50p in modern money, but we managed and we had an absolutely magnificent tour.”
There were 60,000 people packed into Eden Park to watch the 25th game the Lions had played in New Zealand after six matches in Australia. And they still had two games to go on the way home in Canada!
But as much as Davies remembers his final game at Eden Park, he also recalls the moment the Lions arrived in Auckland after the Australian leg of their tour.
“The welcome that we had when we arrived in Auckland is the abiding moment that I feel when I look back at the tour. There must have been 40,000 people in the airport waiting for us – we were the first Lions team to fly into New Zealand,” he added.
“We were then transported by these antique, open-top cars to our hotel and we passed through streets laden with people. It seemed that the whole of New Zealand had come out to meet us.”
The whole of New Zealand will be amassing once again on Saturday to back the All Blacks against the Lions. New Zealand have won 12 of the last 14 tests against the tourists.
New Zealand v Lions in Auckland
1908: New Zealand 29, Lions 0 (Potter’s Park)
1930: New Zealand 15, Lions 10 (Eden Park)
1950: New Zealand 11, Lions 8 (Eden Park)
1959: New Zealand 6, Lions 9 (Eden Park)
1966: New Zealand 24, Lions 11 (Eden Park)
1971: New Zealand 14, Lions 14 (Eden Park)
1977: New Zealand 10, Lions 9 (Eden Park)
1983: New Zealand 38, Lions 6 (Eden Park)
1993: New Zealand 30, Lions 13 (Eden Park)
2005: New Zealand 38, Lions 19 (Eden Park)
The last Lions team to win an international at Eden Park in 1959:
British & Irish Lions: Terry Davies (Wales); Peter Jackson (England), Dave Hewitt (Ireland), Ken Scotland (Scotland), Tony O’Reilly (Ireland); Bev Risman (England), Andy Mulligan (Ireland); Hugh McLeod (Scotland), Ronnie Dawson (Ireland, captain), Ray Prosser (Wales), Rhys Williams (Wales), Bill Mulcahy (Ireland), Noel Murphy (Ireland), Haydn Morgan (Wales), John Faull (Wales)
Players in bold are still alive.
