Twelve years in the making and it took all of 12 seconds for the most obvious clue as to which way this first Test was going to pan out. From the moment Tom Curry thundered into James Slipper – the only surviving Wallaby from the 2013 tour – with a bone-crunching tackle you worried for Australia.
Strip it all back – the hand wringing over the breakdown, the danger posed by Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii, the Lions’ propensity to start slowly – and this remains a simple game. If you win the collisions, then the vast majority of the time you will win the match. So it was that Andy Farrell picked the most powerful pack he could and no one typified that more than Curry.
