Gibbs puts Test case in blood as Lions struggle

New South Wales Country 3 Lions 46

Out in sheep-dip country, where the tough boys tend their acres, a rugby ball is something you pick up when the big ball in the sky sinks below the horizon and the day's work is done. Yesterday, the so-called "Cockatoos" of New South Wales stuck to their guns so resolutely that the sun went down on a fair few Lions of repute. The victory margin was comfortable enough, but the tourists took an interminable amount of time to subdue opponents who very nearly lost to their fellow no-hopers from Western Australia in a recent amateur match. And the Lions, you will remember, scored 116 points in Perth.

Of course, that was a very different pride of Lions – one brimming with hope, optimism and expectation. Three weeks down the line, the midweekers are swimming in a sea of negativity. Some of David Young's men are bitterly frustrated; others not nearly so happy. Their collective malaise was much in evidence yesterday as they took 25 minutes to score an opening try and failed to put a point on the board in a desperate final quarter. As Graham Henry, the coach, rightly pronounced: "It was a poor game of rugby. I'm not about to dig a grave and jump in it, but a lot of our problems out there were self-inflicted."

The Lions' scrummaging was half-hearted at best – "I thought we'd spend the afternoon going backwards, so I was surprised how well we stacked up in the set-piece," said the Cockatoos' captain, Bernie Klasen – and their rucking pitifully indecisive. They were not helped by the referee, Greg Hinton, whose apparent ignorance of the back-foot rule plunged the breakdown area into the realm of high farce. But then, the Lions are big boys now, and they should have sorted it. "We're not getting men to the ball nearly quickly enough," said Scott Gibbs, with refreshing honesty.

Gibbs, inexplicably omitted from the original party back in April, was one of the few Lions to struggle free of the quicksand. Playing his first game as replacement for the injured Mike Catt, he ruffled a fair few Cockatoo feathers with his rumbustious tackling and carried the ball with a degree of intent unmatched by all but two of his colleagues, the highly motivated back-rowers Colin Charvis and Martin Corry.

Gibbs is one of that rare breed who makes a difference simply by being there. By the time the second half was nine minutes old, he had shed his first drops of blood and received his first stitches. The game meant something to him, and it showed.

Too few of his colleagues revealed the same depth of desire, perhaps because the stuffing, spiritual as much as physical, had already been knocked out of them. Iain Balshaw, the new golden boy of English rugby, looked in serious need of a visit to the alchemist, for his performance was very low-carat indeed. Henry picked Balshaw for this game on the assumption that an open field and a couple of 80-metre run-ins would do wonders for the full-back's confidence before Saturday's opening Test with the Wallabies in Brisbane. In the event, Balshaw's level of self-belief took another nose-dive. His form, or lack of it, is now a major concern.

Ben Cohen enjoyed himself a little more, although the Northampton wing needs more than a couple of tries against limited opposition to erase the memory of his half-baked performances against Western Australia and Australia A. An excellent finish on 25 minutes signalled the Lions' one prolonged spell of supremacy – a period that yielded scores for Charvis, Gibbs and Austin Healey before the interval – and he also cruised in from halfway after gathering a long pass from the otherwise anonymous Malcolm O'Kelly, one of three disappointing second rows who have signally failed to challenge Martin Johnson and Danny Grewcock for the Test places.

It said something about the tenor of the tourists' performance that the jet-lagged Munster flanker David Wallace, who together with the Leicester hooker Dorian West arrived here six hours before the game kicked off after a 30-hour flight from Europe, did not look out of place when he replaced Corry with 24 minutes left on the clock, thereby joining his older brothers, Richard and Paul, on the Lions' roll of honour.

Wallace had been travelling to Poland for an Ireland training camp when he was summoned to replace Lawrence Dallaglio – "I'm so disappointed that I didn't make it to Poland; I feel I've lost a part of me," he joked – while West had just set foot in Minorca for a family holiday when he received the call. "I dropped my family at the villa, turned the car around and went straight back to the airport," he said. "It's fair to say that my wife is a bit upset."

Mrs West will not be feeling half as cheesed off as Henry and the rest of the Lions hierarchy, who now know that the vast majority of their Test team are not under the remotest pressure for their places. It is an uncomfortable feeling for any coach. If full-time professionals cannot deal with a 22-year-old brickie by the name of Richard Petty, who led yesterday's Lions a merry dance from scrum-half, how in the name of all that is holy can they expect to work out George Gregan? Answers on a postcard, please.

New South Wales Country: Penalty Croft. Lions: Tries Cohen 2, Charvis, Gibbs, Healey, Young; Conversions Jenkins 5; Penalties Jenkins 2.

NEW SOUTH WALES COUNTRY: N Croft; W Crosby, R Macdougal, K Shepherd, V Tailasa; C Doyle, R Petty; A Baldwin, J McCormack, M Bowman, D Lubans, B Wright, B Dale, C Taylor, B Klasen (capt). Replacements: D Dimmock for Taylor, 56; G Refshauge for Wright, 60; D Banovich for Macdougal, 65; J Vaalotu for McCormack, 67; M Brown for Shepherd, 68; D Thomas for Baldwin, 70; M Ellis for Doyle, 70; Baldwin for Bowman, 84.

LIONS: I Balshaw (Bath and England); B Cohen (Northampton and England), M Taylor (Swansea and Wales), S Gibbs (Swansea and Wales), T Howe (Ulster and Ireland); N Jenkins (Cardiff and Wales), A Healey (Leicester and England); J Leonard (Harlequins and England), G Bulloch (Glasgow Caledonians and Scotland), D Young (Cardiff and Wales, capt), J Davidson (Ulster and Ireland), M O'Kelly (Leinster and Ireland), C Charvis (Swansea and Wales), M Williams (Cardiff and Wales), M Corry

(Leicester and England). Replacements: D Wallace (Munster and Ireland) for Corry, 56; D Morris (Swansea and Wales) for Leonard, 56; S Murray (Saracens and Scotland) for O'Kelly, 72.

Referee: G Hinton (Australia).

* Andre Vos has been stripped of the South African captaincy and replaced by Bobby Skinstad. The Springboks' coach, Harry Viljoen, made the "extremely difficult" decision following the Test double header against France, which saw South Africa level the series with a narrow victory at the weekend.