Optimism grows for British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa

Fans ready to spend thousands on the British and Irish Lions tour to South Africa next summer should do so in full confidence that the contingency plans are already being put in place to ensure the series can go ahead.

With the Lions’ managing director Ben Calveley guaranteeing that every fan will be refunded if coronavirus prevents the tour from going ahead, supporters have shown “five times the interest expressed on previous tours”, despite the uncertainty surrounding international sport and - more importantly - global travel of mass groups.

The five-week tour begins when the Lions fly out to Cape Town the day after their newly announced Test against Japan in Scotland, with full tour packages for fans priced at around £22,000. However, while the UK recorded another 26,688 coronavirus cases on Wednesday - a new record number within a 24-hour window - South Africa is in a very different scenario, with daily numbers ranging between 1,000-2,000 and total deaths fewer than half the 44,000-plus recorded on these shores. As a result, Calveley is optimistic that the tour will go ahead as planned with no requirement to move the location of the series just in an effort to stage it at all.

“Rates in the UK are going up and our restrictions are going up, but South Africa’s infection rate and importantly the mortality rate has been lower than ours since the onset of the pandemic,” Calveley said. “We’re seeing their infection curve lower and, potentially, plateau.

“There isn’t anything out there to suggest the numbers would be so great that you’d consider switching locations. And when it comes to thinking about a third country, you would need to consider doing that very early to make those arrangements and there would be no guarantee every country would be Covid free by the time you got there.

“All countries are subject to outbreaks and short-notice restrictions and border closures. Our focus is on making sure we are ready to deal with whatever the Covid environment is next year in South Africa on the dates that have been announced.

“The call has already been made, in that we are intending to go to South Africa. That call has already been made, the dates have been announced and we are just working very hard with the South African Rugby Union to make sure that’s possible.

“If a contingency or a scenario emerged that you had to go down a different route, we’ll deal with that situation as and when that scenario emerges. Between now and then we just keep things constantly under review. At the risk of restating myself multiple times, we are very much focussed on the tour going ahead on the dates we’ve announced.”

What has helped fuel that optimism among the Lions chief is the demand from fans who have been locked out of professional sporting events for more than seven months now. The Covid-19 pandemic has seen stadia shut to the public since the Six Nations was halted in mid-March, and the situation remains the same in South Africa where supporters still cannot attend sporting events just yet.

But the appetite for the Lions tour witnessed in the UK has been mirrored on the other side of the equator, with 323,964 ticket applications registered among Springboks fans. It has contributed to a ticket demand the likes of which the Lions have never witnessed before, with the Lions also predicting the largest ‘Sea of Red’ to travel overseas as long as circumstances allow such a feat.

“What we’re seeing is that if you just look at ticket sales there are three ways you can get tickets for this tour,” explained Calveley. “You can either apply for the Lions ticket-only ballot - we launched the ticket-only ballot for the first time for this tour as it hasn’t been available in the past - and that was oversubscribed incredibly heavily.

“You can get travel packages where you bundle your ticket for the match with flights and accommodation and so on, and the level of interest was approximately five times higher than what we’ve had on previous tours. We sold the level of packages that we sold for the Australia tour within one day of going on sale, and I think it took a week to get beyond the number of packages that were sold for the New Zealand tour.

“And if you look at South Africa, the interest is incredibly high given that two of the Test matches sold out in record time - they were gone within an hour of going on sale - and the third Test match because it’s played in a great big 92,000-seat venue at Soccer City took a little bit longer, about a couple of days.

“But all of them sold out and are very heavily oversubscribed. All of those numbers suggest that not only is the interest there but people are intending to travel in their droves.”