THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE is an extract from ‘This is Your Everest’.

AFTER THE WIN against Western Province the boys hit the town, arriving at a Mexican place called Cantina Tequila for a proper booze-up. Gregor Townsend remembers it well.

‘Keith Wood’s got the girl who’s got the tequila, he’s lying on the ground – now, you couldn’t do it nowadays because everyone would be taking photos of it. You’d be in the tabloids, you’d be destroyed. There was one night we got warned – remember Loaded magazine?

‘We had a meeting to say that a Loaded journalist was coming out with a photographer, so we had to make sure we didn’t do anything silly. There was a group of us came back, probably at like two in the morning after the Western Province game, and this journalist and photographer from Loaded were sitting in the reception.

‘We were lucky that nothing happened — there was no story for them. I remember reading the article in the next month’s magazine and it was mainly about Lions supporters and South Africa and had some interviews with players, but they were obviously waiting to trip someone up with a scandalous story.’

Barry Williams: Social media is the fucking killer for everyone. Every sportsman. You could be innocently having a chat with someone and the next thing you see so-and-so is in the paper. It’s spoiling things. That ’97 tour was the crossover tour before things got stupid, before they were selling rights for everything and they wanted their pound of flesh.

Rob Howley: As a player, you’re very mindful that drinking alcohol affects your ability to train, but there’s a balancing act because you need to get to know the other players. Especially as a nine – it’s really important that you get to know your forwards because you’re the one shouting and screaming at them in the game. Sometimes the language you use on the field is different to what you’d use in the bar. You have to be honest and direct. Having a beer with them and getting to know them socially accelerates the friendship and makes it easier for you to bark orders at them on the pitch.

Dai Young: After every game we all went out together and had a couple of beers and a meal and a lot of the times it would be where the supporters were as well, which was great. It was a fantastic atmosphere, and you realised pretty quickly how important it was and how many people were out there. You can easily become trapped in a bubble and not realise how important it is outside of that.

Alan Tait: Geech had thrown me in at twelve against Province because Gibbsy was injured and on the night out in that Mexican place, Dai and Gibbsy were having a few beers and Dai called me over and he says, ‘You’ve just got Gibbsy his ticket home after that performance.’ I’d played well.

Gibbsy was pretty down because he’d done his ankle in and Dai had no sympathy at all. He said, ‘That’s your ticket now, Scotty boy. They’re going to be flying you home after Taity’s performance.’ And I could see Gibbsy’s face, and honest to God, he was absolutely broken. I said, ‘Hey, Gibbsy, come on, man, you’ll be alright, pal.’

He went, ‘Oh, God, you reckon they’ll send me home?’ and Dai was just rubbing it in and rubbing it in. I said to Gibbsy, ‘Look, mate, don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a twelve. I won’t be playing twelve in the Test matches. I’m telling you: you’re the twelve, so get your head on.’

It was a position I could play, but I wasn’t comfortable there – certainly not for a Test match for the Lions. I was a thirteen or even a winger, but twelve was kind of strange to me. Gibbsy was clearly going to be the man. He just needed to get his ankle right and the coaches were going to give him every opportunity to do that, but it’s bloody funny looking back on the way Dai was winding him up. No mercy at all.

The following morning, bleary-eyed and dying from hangovers, the Lions flew to Pretoria. The newspapers were full of reports of the spat between Bentley and Small including Small’s allegation that his opposite number had gouged him during Saturday’s game.

Fran Cotton addressed it at the next press conference. ‘We’re here to talk about rugby, not massage James Small’s ego. As far as we’re concerned, the allegation is nonsense. I suspect the motivation is really to deflect the attention away from the fact that he had a pretty average game and Bentley put two tries past him.’

Small responded by saying, ‘It annoys me that people are always prepared to judge my actions without knowing the full story. What he did was not in the rules. He fingered me in the eye when I was defenceless.’

John Bentley: It was a total fabrication.

Ian McGeechan: It was an accusation that we treated with the contempt it deserved.

Fran Cotton: The whole thing was totally unnecessary. Small was a very good player but he was obviously into the psychology bit too. He wanted to unsettle us and get some payback after John had got the better of him.

John Bentley: The South African management seemed to find it all a bit embarrassing. Carel du Plessis said, ‘At this level, you have to be able to stay in control and James allowed himself to be weak.’ The South African rugby union decided not to cite me, so they obviously believed my side of the story.

Ian McGeechan: We had to move on quickly from the incident – and Jim didn’t hang around. We’d scrummed poorly against Western Province and Jim was furious – which was bad news for the forwards.

Jim Telfer had reached the end of his tether right enough. He gathered his players together and gave it to them straight. He thought they were docile against Western Province – ‘tiptoeing through everything’, as he put it.

He felt some were either in the comfort zone or were knocking on the door of the comfort zone. It was time for him to send them a reminder of what they were going to be dealing with down the line and how tough they were going to have to be in order to meet what was coming their way. Captured for posterity by the film crew, it was another classic Telfer address.

‘There are two types of rugby players, boys,’ he said. ‘There’s honest ones, and there’s the rest. The honest player gets up in the morning, looks himself in the fucking mirror and sets his standard, sets his stall out, and says: “I’m going to get better, I’m going to get better, I’m going to get better.” He doesnae complain about the food, or the beds, or the referees, or all these sorts of things. They’re just peripheral things that weak players are always complaining about. The dishonest player.

‘If I tell a player he’s too high or he’s no’ tight enough – he’s too fucking high, he’s not tight enough and that’s it and I’m the judge and not the player. And we accept that. And we do something about it.

‘I’ve coached Lions teams before and we’ve complained and carped about this, that and the next thing. And I liken it a bit to the British and Irish going abroad on holiday. The first thing they look for is a fucking English pub; the second thing they look for is a pint of Guinness and the third thing they look for is a fish and chip shop.

‘The only thing they accept is the sun. They don’t take on anything that’s good or decent or different abroad. If we do that, we’re sunk. Because we don’t go back bitching, we don’t go back carping: “Oh, if we’d done this at Twickenham or the Arms Park or Lansdowne Road or Murrayfield . . .” No, no, these days are past. What’s accepted over there is not accepted over here. And it’s not accepted by us — me and you.

‘So from now on, the page has turned. We’re on a new book. Different attitudes. We’re honest with ourselves. And in many respects in the forward play — and let’s be fucking honest — we’ve been second best. We can match them. But only if we get it right here [a finger rises to his head] — and right here [he points to his heart].

‘Two weeks. There’re battles all along the way. There’s a battle on Wednesday. There’s a battle on Saturday. There’s a battle next Wednesday and there’s a battle the following Saturday; there’s a battle the following Tuesday; until we’re fucking into the big arena. The one we were there on Saturday.

‘And by that time the fucking Lions have to make them fucking roar for us. Because they’ll be baying for blood. And let’s hope it’s fucking Springbok blood. We’re focused. From now on, the kid gloves are off. It’s bare-knuckle fucking stuff. And only at the end of the day will the man who’s standing on his feet win the fucking battle.’

Keith Wood: I could probably recite you that whole speech right now, more than twenty years later.

Tom Smith: Jim is very articulate and I think it’s his background as a teacher, he’s a very good communicator and what he was saying to everybody was pretty stark: we weren’t going to succeed if we didn’t address this problem. I remember the intensity of that meeting: it was just deadly silence. You look at the forwards on that tour – you’ve got Jason Leonard, Keith Wood, Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio – all guys that are vocal, but there was just total silence as Jim spoke.

Rob Wainwright: The hairs on the back of your neck were standing up after that.

Martin Johnson: He was right. We’d been a distant second in the scrums.

Jim Telfer: The basic principle of what I was saying was that the players had to be honest with themselves. They had to look in the mirror and understand what was required. From now on, we’d be taking no prisoners and we wouldn’t pick anyone who wasn’t prepared to work. We had to adapt to the conditions. No whinging; all positivity.

Keith Wood: I heard a lot of strange talk about Jim Telfer before I went on that tour. It was good to see it was all true. He drove us to the absolute edge of our ability and it was about weeding out any possible flaws in the squad so you were left with this team that had the mental toughness to get through the Test series.

I’ve said it before, if we were on tour for another day we’d have killed him. We were all falling apart by the very end of it. We hit a level of effort and training that, to be honest, we weren’t fit enough for. We pushed ourselves beyond the limit. It was both technical and mental — and we loved it.

The Lions were preparing to play their fourth game on tour against the bruisers of Mpumalanga in midweek but first they were having a forwards training session that none of them will ever forget, even if they live to be a hundred.

Ian McGeechan: It was forty scrums in forty-five minutes.

Matt Dawson: It was fifty or sixty.

Neil Back: A normal scrum session at club level would involve you doing four sets of three, maybe at a push five sets of three, on the machine. But we did twenty sets of three – so sixty scrums.

Keith Wood: We did forty-three scrums. These numbers etched on my brain. Forty-three scrums in forty minutes.

Gregor Townsend: That was the hundred-odd scrum session, wasn’t it?

Graham Rowntree: Jim knew how to drive a pack. No bullshit; drive us hard; lots of physical contact. We were training hard and fast every day and then we did fifty scrums in that session. Fifty scrums! It may have even been sixty or more. It felt like two hundred.

Gregor Townsend (file pic). Billy Stickland / INPHO Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO

Gregor Townsend: They got killed. It was just: scrum, do some tackles, come back and scrum, get up and sprint to the posts, do some mauling, come back and scrum.

Tom Smith: Jim loved that machine, it was his toy. It was a piece of torture equipment. They dug the stakes about a metre into the ground and the pads had hydraulics built in that Jim could control with a lever.

You’d hit the scrum and the pads would move under the pressure but because the machine itself was dug into the ground, it wouldn’t move. Then Jim would pull on the lever, the hydraulics would kick in and the pads would start to push back at you.

So you had the weight of your pack pushing from behind you and the hydraulics pushing from in front of you. And you had to hold, hold, hold – and then it was up and sprint sixty metres, sprint back, and on again, and on again, and on again.

Keith Wood: It was a stupid bit of kit, actually, because they had worked out that you can get up to two and a half tons of pressure across the front row’s neck in a scrum, and so that’s what the hydraulics were built to do.

In a scrum you might have that pressure of two and a half tons – but not the entire time. Something always gives after a second or two. Either my opponent gives or I give – something happens, someone goes up, someone goes down.

Well, a hydraulic machine doesn’t give and so our job was to hit the scrum and hold it for thirty seconds. And the only thing that could give was us, because the machine was unrelenting. I put a disc out on that Lions tour. Actually, I tore my groin as well, which I think was exacerbated by our scrummaging sessions.

Paul Wallace: It was like a punishment. But what Jim was great at was getting the extra few per cent out of you. You thought you were doing everything you physically could, but he would demand more – and you found that you could give it.

Jeremy Davidson: It was fucking horrible, but he had our total buy-in.

Keith Wood: I remember Telfer’s line, when we broke from the scrum, which was: ‘Run as fast as you can and then accelerate.’ One of those lines of magic, right? You just had to put yourself into another place, mentally. It was just horrendous. You’d hit the machine, the pressure would come on, you’d bind as tight as you could, you did everything you could, and you went to another place. That was all, it was just . . . It was horrible. It was white-hot and it was horrible.

But we learned that our well was pretty deep, that is one thing for certain. So I don’t begrudge the session. I hated the machine, but I don’t begrudge it at all. I think it’s a kind of mark of pride that we did that session.

Jim Telfer: That was the most concentrated session I ever did on a scrum machine. We probably did about 60 scrums in 30 minutes but not one player complained, not one player bitched.

We actually had a lot of the press watching – they’d heard about this mammoth session we’d planned and had come to see it. It was designed to be as much a mental exercise as a physical one because I knew that we were moving into the toughest part of the provincial tour.

We were due to play against three of the most famous provinces in South Africa – Northern Transvaal, Gauteng and the then top province, Natal – in eight days. Fran Cotton called it ‘the Bermuda Triangle’ because any players who didn’t stand up there would disappear. I know I nearly broke them and I’m sure a few ended up a bit shorter. But they responded.

Martin Johnson: One of Jim’s main strengths was that he talked with complete conviction. He sometimes got so intense that he started frothing at the mouth. If a coach gets the tone wrong, everyone can switch off. But with Jim, everyone switched on and improved. And, to be honest, we needed to. The scrum wasn’t going well but after that we really went for it in the sessions. They became a lot more aggressive and very hard work.

Tom Smith: We needed to suffer as a team to bring us together. Sometimes there’s something to be said for just going through a collective experience like that to make everybody concentrate on what they need to do to fix any problems. And once you’ve been through an experience like that together, you always have each other’s back. It binds you.

Jim Telfer: I was convinced that the key to success was the front row and I told the players that there was no way we would annihilate the Springbok pack – very few teams have ever done that in South Africa – but if we got parity, we had a chance.

The point about that scrummaging session was that it could be regarded as money in the bank; those players involved now knew that they could reach that level again if necessary. A number of doubts will have been erased from their minds.

Richard Hill: You live people’s experiences. You live their pain and you live their joy when it’s over. You knew that the guys around you had the capacity levels for hard work. You knew that everybody that was there was prepared to go to the last breath, because you’d seen it. You knew how far they could go and you also knew that if you weren’t putting it in, you were letting them down. It was a session that still gives me nightmares, but it was such an important moment in the tour.

Scott Gibbs: He knew what he wanted. He wanted them rucking two inches off the floor, so the body height was very important. It sounds ridiculous, but whether it was a broom handle or a cane, he wanted the guys lower so they could create quicker ball, and cause a bit of damage along the way. You’d watch them trampling on each other in training, Jim bellowing away. It was brutal, man.

Jeremy Davidson: Looking back and having gone into coaching myself, you realise that Jim was a lot more astute than you would have given him credit for back in those days. You kind of thought of him as a bit of a grumbly growler kind of coach who got you motivated by shouting at you and intimidating you, but there was a lot of method and thought behind what he did. Jim knew best.

The South Africans were just men mountains. No matter what team you came across, you were looking up. You came to a lineout, you were looking up at the guy opposite or you were looking at him and thinking, ‘God, he’s twice the width of me and twice the depth of me’.

Martin Johnson: My shoulder was giving me grief, so I couldn’t train a hundred per cent. The session that morning was brutal and everyone worked very, very hard, doing everything Jim asked of them – but I felt a bit of a fake, just sitting watching the lads while Jim shouted at them. I could see their legs getting tired, I could see them going through the pain . . . and I was sitting there twiddling my thumbs. I hated it.

Sometimes you knew you had to rest and that was one of those days, but it was difficult at the time because I wanted to be out there doing it. Not just because I was the captain, but because I wanted to do it.

‘This is Your Everest: The Lions, The Springboks and the Epic Tour of 1997′ by Tom English is published by Polaris. More info here.