Lions’ first-choice half-backs will unite for first time against Queensland
Everyone connected with the British & Irish Lions is gutted for Tomos Williams, ruled out of the tour through injury at a horribly early stage.Not only had the Gloucester scrum-half been performing well but his unfortunate early exit with a torn hamstring means the squad’s Welsh representation is now so skinny it can fit into a single pair of jeans.While that inevitably places extra responsibility on Jac Morgan’s shoulders as the last Welsh player standing, it also tweaks the bigger picture at scrum-half.Ben White has been summoned from Scotland’s tour of New Zealand to be Williams’s replacement and now has an opportunity to vie with Alex Mitchell for a place in the matchday 23 for the best-of-three Test series.Even at this juncture, though, the Lions’ first-choice half-back combo is all too obvious.
The arranged marriage between Jamison Gibson-Park and Finn Russell has been delayed by a niggling injury to the former but the pair will be united for the first time when the Lions play the Queensland Reds on Wednesday,The mere fact Russell is the solitary squad member asked to back up from last Saturday shows the management’s urgent desire to see their twin playmakers combine on the field,The only question now is how long the partnership will take to flourish; previously these have been rivals seeking to stifle each other’s talents,Gibson-Park, 33, has played with numerous talented fly-halves in his time, not least Johnny Sexton who is a contrasting character to the ever-smiling Russell,It is Gibson-Park’s firm belief, though, that he and Russell could have a productive and exciting future together.
“He’s a hugely impressive player, isn’t he?” said Gibson-Park, finally recovered from the strained glute that forced him to miss the United Rugby Championship final.“Every team he’s in he has a huge impact.I can only speak from the times I’ve come up against him and the preparation time it takes to try to limit what he is able to bring.That in itself is a huge compliment to him.”The Lions head coach, Andy Farrell, has seen enough of Gibson-Park to regard him as potentially a linchpin in his Test side.
“It’s there for all to see.I don’t say this lightly: he’s 100% a world-class player and he would make any team better.His speed of play is like it is because his speed of thought is ahead of the game.”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.
Blend the two together and the Lions are hoping for an instant rapport, even if Gibson-Park accepts that not all great half-back pairings are forged overnight.“There is a gelling period with any 9/10 combination.We have spent some nice time together off the pitch, which is hugely important … and hopefully we can see it out there on Wednesday.”It will be fascinating to see how they do dovetail, with Bath’s captain, Ben Spencer, having previously revealed his first interaction with Russell involved the Scot placing him in a head lock and saying, “give me the ball”.Gibson-Park joked about having had a similar experience.
“He plays the game with a smile on his face and it’s refreshing to see sometimes.But you don’t see him in the meeting rooms.There is a serious side to him but when he’s out there playing ball it’s impressive to watch.”Whatever happens, Gibson-Park is hugely relieved to be up and running.He had to undergo numerous scans – “they had every radiologist in the country trying to figure out what was going on” – but now slots into a matchday 23 featuring his Leinster colleagues Hugo Keenan and James Ryan for the first time.
The nine-strong contingent of Irish players is outnumbered this time, though, by 10 Englishmen, led by the tour captain, Maro Itoje.The Reds have named a side containing nine Wallabies and two All Blacks with the Lions braced for further Australian trolling regarding the southern hemisphere heritage of some of their players.“I don’t really care, I am used to it at this stage,” said Gibson-Park, raised on a small island north-east of Auckland.“I have had a fair amount of it over my years with Ireland.Everybody is entitled to their opinion and that’s fine.
Aussies like to wind people up, it is part of their background, but it doesn’t bother me,”Itoje said the Lions would be taking a phlegmatic approach after copping some nationality related flak from the matchday PA announcer in Perth,“It’s the Australian way, isn’t it? That’s a minor comment and something we don’t really pay too much attention to,”
My cultural awakening: Buffy gave me the courage to escape my conservative Pakistani upbringing
I was 10, cross-legged on the floor of my parents’ living room in Newcastle, bathed in the blue light of a TV. The volume was set to near-silence – my dad, asleep in another room, had schizophrenia and frontal lobe syndrome, and I didn’t want to wake him. Then, like some divine interruption to the endless blur of news and repeats, I stumbled across Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show may have been barely audible, but it hit me like a lightning bolt.Before Buffy, life was like a pressure cooker
Your front-row pass to who the performers will be watching at Glastonbury
Hello from Worthy Farm, home to Glastonbury festival! As is tradition, this newsletter is coming to you from a sparsely apportioned cabin behind the festival’s legendary Pyramid stage, which this weekend will feature headline sets from The 1975, Neil Young and Olivia Rodrigo.The festival proper is kicking off right about now, though really it has been whirring away for two days already. The official opening was on Wednesday night: a circus spectacular on the Pyramid stage featuring jugglers, drummers, fire-flinging dancers and a bloke doing handstands on a fairy-light-strewn bike suspended above the audience. The extravaganza came courtesy of the talented folk from Glastonbury’s theatre and circus fields, who were tasked with opening the festival for the first time since the early 90s.(Incidentally, the Theatre and Circus Fields have a pretty remarkable origin story: in 1971 Winston Churchill’s granddaughter Arabella was being relentlessly hounded by the paparazzi in London, having created a bit of a stink by daring to speak out against the Vietnam war
‘Joyous, immersive’ Beamish wins Art Fund museum of the year award
Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, has won the prestigious Art Fund museum of the year award, the largest such prize in the world.Awarding it the £120,000 prize, judges called Beamish a “joyous, immersive and unique place shaped by the stories and experiences of its community”.The open-air museum in County Durham, which is celebrating its 55th anniversary, brings north-east England’s Georgian, Edwardian, 1940s and 1950s history to life through immersive exhibits.Visitors engage with costumed staff and volunteers and experience regional stories of everyday life. The museum has a longstanding commitment to preserving local heritage
Seth Meyers on Trump’s new Nato nickname: ‘Why is anyone calling him daddy?’
Late-night hosts discussed Donald Trump’s belief that he should win a Nobel peace prize and the bizarre new name given to him by the Nato chief.On Late Night, Seth Meyers said that Trump’s insistence that he deserves the Nobel peace prize for inserting himself into the Iran-Israel conflict is “obviously insane” but “at best we can trick him” by offering him a “Babybel piece of cheese on a lanyard”.He added that “no president should get a Nobel peace prize” and played footage of Trump listing all of the things he has done that deserve one. “This idiot thinks it’s the Nathan’s hotdog contest,” he said.Meyers said that Trump is thirsty for praise “for stopping an illegal war he started” and is now “absolutely livid” that the ceasefire was violated
Stephen Colbert on Ice: ‘Constantly devising new terrible ways to treat immigrants’
Late-night hosts talked about US involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict and how the situation at home should be higher on the priority list.On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert spoke about the “tenuous ceasefire” that Donald Trump has been taking credit for after getting involved in the situation between Israel and Iran.The president’s controversial decision to bomb Iran has led some of his most ardent loyalists to claim he deserves the Nobel peace prize.Colbert said he is “not sure if they give an award for bombing people into submission” and anyway, they “kept bombing each other” despite an alleged ceasefire.The ongoing conflict led Trump to lose his cool with press, telling reporters that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”
‘She killed three husbands with this teapot’: Prue Leith, Huw Stephens and more pick their favourite museum
From a stray meteorite to an immersive coal pit, via the chance to sit on a ‘feeding chair’, famous fans tell us how they fell in love with the UK’s Museum of the Year finalistsIt’s rare to hear someone getting this excited over a teapot. But as Terry Deary tells me, with exactly the kind of relish you’d expect from the author of Horrible Histories, this particular drinks vessel belonged to the Victorian-era mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton. Believed to have killed 12 of her children, not to mention three husbands, she was finally caught after poisoning her stepson in 1872 with an arsenic-laced brew. “And in Beamish they’ve got the teapot!” says Deary. “I was blown away to hold it!”He’s talking about Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, an open-air site based in County Durham (just like Cotton herself, who was eventually hanged in Durham Gaol)
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