To say the last couple of days have been a blur for Blair Kinghorn is putting it mildly. As recently as the early hours of Sunday he was celebrating Toulouse’s Top 14 title success in Paris and doing interviews clad only in a pair of budgie smugglers. Now here he is wearing a British & Irish Lions tracksuit, squinting into the Australian sunshine and trying his hardest to focus on the next onrushing target.
The Scotland full-back, the last originally-chosen squad member to arrive, will not be involved in the Lions’ midweek game against the Reds but is earmarked to feature against the Waratahs in Sydney on Saturday. All being well a potential slot in the Test XV could follow but even for a class act like Kinghorn it is going to take a lot of frantic paddling below the surface to get up to speed.
To some extent the 28-year-old’s ability to adapt swiftly has already been tested. Arriving at the team hotel shortly before midnight he was allocated a room which he assumed would be empty given the lateness of the hour. “I was thinking, ‘Surely there won’t be anyone in the room’ so I go in and chuck the bags down.”
It was a shock for all concerned, then, when the Lions captain Maro Itoje suddenly sat bolt upright in the bed next to him. “I was like ‘Uh, sorry’. He’d been sleeping and I woke him up. It was funny. He woke up, shook my hand and went straight back to sleep.” As Lions welcomes go, it definitely belonged at the surreal end of the scale.
Once the jetlag eases and he finally works out what day it is, though, Kinghorn’s recent experiences could prove invaluable for the Lions. Switching to Toulouse from Edinburgh has helped to improve him as a player and, as a consequence, he is now in a position to add a touch of that winning mentality to the mix ahead of the Test series against the Wallabies.
For a start, as a teammate of the world’s best player Antoine Dupont, he is comfortable mixing in high-level company. “At Toulouse the squad is so deep and so talented that you’ve got to be on top of your game. It’s high pressure, but it makes you thrive.” He is hoping for something similar with the Lions. “Everyone’s here to win the Test series and have a successful tour. Every training session is going to be competitive. Everyone’s motivated and that’s what you want. That brings the best out of people.”
The long-striding Scot can also operate at both full-back and on the wing, having also played Test rugby at 10. It could give Farrell the useful option of picking a 6-2 bench but, either way, Kinghorn knows he has scant time to waste in which to stake a claim. “The next couple of days will be the big days for me to learn everything but hopefully I’ll catch up pretty quickly. All I can do is learn as fast as I can and show what I can do if I get the chance to play.”
Kinghorn, who reckons a Lions tour of France would be “awesome” and potentially a big hit with Gallic audiences, is in a not dissimilar boat to Jamison Gibson-Park, Hugo Keenan and James Ryan, all of whom will be making their Lions debuts against the Reds.
The previously untested half-back pairing of Gibson-Park and Finn Russell will be the subject of particular attention but forwards coach John Dalziel also expects his pack to learn the lessons of the Western Force game when the restarts, in particular, were problematic.
“It was a bit of communication, a bit of skill error when a couple weren’t caught and a bit of people trying to fix it on their own. We had a chat at half-time and it is something we will have a heightened interest in.”
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Dalziel has already been in contact with the legendary Jim Telfer, the godfather of Lions forward coaching, who also hails from the Borders and has shared one or two nuggets of advice with him.
If this Lions squad scales the same Everest-sized peaks as some of their predecessors reached under Telfer’s tutelage it will be some effort but, at this stage, Farrell is urging his players not to get overly carried away against a Reds team guided by Les Kiss, the Wallabies’ next head coach-in-waiting: “Desperation is not a good thing because it makes people do things out of character and we need to be more composed than that.”
Queensland Reds:Campbell (capt); Anderson, Flook, Paisami, Ryan; McLaughlin-Phillips, Thomas; Ross, Faessler, Toomaga-Allen, Canham, Salakaia-Loto, Uru, Bryant, Brial.
Replacements:Nasser, Blake, Fa’agase, Smith, Blyth, Vest, Werchon, Henry.
British & Irish Lions :Keenan; Freeman, Jones, Aki, Van der Merwe; Russell, Gibson-Park; Porter, Kelleher, Stuart, Itoje (capt), Chessum, Curry, Morgan, Conan.
Replacements:Cowan-Dickie, Genge, Bealham, Ryan, Earl, Mitchell, F Smith, Ringrose.
Itoje, meanwhile, has reiterated that modern players remain hugely motivated by a Lions jersey even at a time when mooted breakaway leagues and world club championships are threatening the game’s status quo. “Players want to play for the Lions and that’s not going to change for generations to come,” stressed Itoje flatly. “It was the same in the 1950s and it will be the same in 2050.”