British and Irish Lions: Maori All Blacks have added fuel of Mana in effort to beat Warren Gatland's men

The first overseas team to ever tour the Home Nations will stand toe-to-toe with the British and Irish Lions on Saturday morning, ready to take on the strongest XV they have to offer and with every intention of crushing them in their path.

What was then the ‘New Zealand Natives’, playing an incredible 107 matches on that first-ever tour in 1888/89, is now the Maori All Blacks. They beat the Lions back in 2005 and they’re ready to do so again in the Lions’ final serious test before playing the real thing next Saturday.

Memories of that famous victory remain very fresh among the locals here in Rotorua, and they will once again draw on their Mana to invoke the spirit needed to down the tourists’ best side.

Gatland has responded to Tuesday’s defeat by the Highlanders by throwing out as close to his starting Test side as possible, with Owen Farrell absent through injury and Sam Warburton among the replacements in an effort to get more minutes under his belt.

Two defeats to Super Rugby sides bodes poorly for Gatland’s travelling band, but even those sides didn’t approach their matches with the level of passion you can expect in the Bay of Plenty.

The heritage of New Zealand, the Maori spirit and over 100 hundred years of Mana will be what stares down the Lions on Saturday, and if they felt that by sending out the first choice XV a processional victory would follow, they have another thing coming.

For this is a side steeped in identity, culture and history. From the bones of that 1888 tour came the Maori side in 1910, and they soon adopted an all-black strip, the silver fern and began performing a Haka before matches. Essentially, the Maori side were the pioneers of what became the globally feared All Blacks.

This all stemmed from Mana, the Maori description for what is most closely translated as a supernatural feeling of power, effectiveness and prestige. To be a Maori All Black, an individual must prove their whakapapa. This is an authority derived from ancestral connections, with players needed to recite the land and river that their ancestors hail from, along with their blood line to prove a Maori background.

One of the Maori’s recent additions is the All Blacks wing, Nehe Milner-Skudder, who just missed out on a place in Steve Hansen’s senior squad after suffering a year of hell on the injury front. It’s very possible that a strong showing this weekend could lead to the Hurricanes back featuring at some point in the Test series, but for now he is drawing on his ancestors’ spirit to deliver another devastating blow to the Lions.

“It's in our blood and we are proud Maori boys that wakapapa back to our ancestors who were put on this earth,” Milner-Skudder said this week. “We will draw on that and we have spoken a lot about it and have connected back to our ancestors to bind us all together. A lot of that passion and emotion will be out there.

“We have our own little dials that we dial up when we try and draw motivation and the huge one is our Maori blood and our culture and heritage. When the boys get on the field they know what they need to do and go and do it.”

It is fitting, then, that this fifth tour match takes place in Rotorua, a city steeped in the history of the Maori culture that will also see an attempt at the world’s biggest ever Haka take place on Saturday before the match. The Lions have faced three since landing in New Zealand two weeks ago, but this promises to be somewhat different. Somewhat more intense. Somewhat more ferocious.

Floods of fans will flock to the International Stadium in Rotorua, the city known as “Maoridom”, built on the Rotorua Caldera volcano which hasn’t erupted for 240,000 years but still shapes the lakes and landscape around town.

The Maori heritage in New Zealand goes back hundreds of years to the earliest arrivals on canoes, but these, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, have begun to chisel out their own rugby traditions over the last 150 years or so.

To some, this final warm-up feels like something that pales into insignificance compared to next week’s first Test.

But if the Maori All Blacks can repeat their 2005 heroics and inflict another defeat on the Lions this weekend, expect Rotorua folklore to be re-written once again.