TFF had a little fun with my Thursday column, this week, trying to educate the leaguies on the glory of the Lions. Ahem ...

“Just how many people care about the result, and will be watching?

“More even than watch an Origin series. Yes, that big! Actually, it’s sort of like those matches you play in Las Vegas in March, except that, instead of it drawing an Australian audience of a couple of million, plus 55,000 Americans, this will draw a genuinely global audience from across the planet in the 133 countries where rugby is played. The last one to these shores pulled in about 100 million. (No, no, an actual 100 million. Not the 100 million some were claiming would watch the Las Vegas stuff.)”

Not all the leaguies took it in quite the right spirit! And some even made unkind remarks about how boring rugby is, and what a snore-fest the Lions tour is. But I don’t think they’ve caught up. Those remarks certainly did apply to elite rugby five or so years ago, and this columnist for one wrote many times back then that if I saw one more collapsed scrum, or one more forward drive where they endlessly took the ball up a centimetre at a time, followed by penalty shootathon, I was not only going to turn off the tube but throw a chair through the window for good measure.

But, right now, it ain’t like that. Somehow, they have solved the collapsed scrums thing, just as they have somehow opened the game up. And teams are actually going for real, actual tries, by spreading the ball wide and running it. That describes the Super Rugby season just gone, which I have enjoyed more than most, and most strangely of it all, it also applies to this mighty Lions side.

As we have seen in the first two matches of their tour, they play a fantastic kind of rugby that is very close to the way the game was always meant to be played. It will be for Australia to try and match them in the three-Test series. It is already obvious it won’t be won on tepid play and penalties!

Huw Jones streaks away to score for the Lions against the Reds.Credit: Getty Images

Fresh meat!

Every week or so in the ongoing culture wars, it is nothing if not amusing to see the conservative commentariat whip themselves into a lather over some minor matter or other that normal people barely blink at.

Take your pick: If someone hasn’t “cancelled Christmas”; they’ve allowed a transgender student to participate in normal school activities; or maybe even said it is ludicrous to still start sessions of parliament with the Lord’s Prayer when few Australians still believe a man in a white smock above the clouds is listening anyway.

You know the drill.

Manna from heaven! Cue: nasty cartoons, thunderous editorials, raging rants on what sadly passes for talkback these days and stern admonitions that Australia as we know it is coming to an end and everyone will soon learn the lesson, “go woke, go........

© The Sydney Morning Herald