Murrayfield bore reveals true toll of Lions' tour

Recent experience teaches us that nothing much can be inferred from the initial stages of the Heineken Cup. Last season, you may remember, Irish and Welsh teams did well – just as they have done so far this season – only for Swansea and Cardiff to crash out to Leicester and Gloucester respectively, and for Leicester to win the trophy.

At the beginning of last season it was thought that the form of the leading provinces, Munster and Leinster, would guarantee a strong Irish performance in the Six Nations' Championship. So it proved, up to a point, until the competition was curtailed by the foot and mouth epidemic. Ireland duly entered this season, when the championship was to be concluded, with the realistic prospect of defeating Scotland and Wales – and the not wholly fanciful possibility of giving the same treatment to England in a late-autumn grand finale in Dublin.

Oddly enough, there was not much pre-match excitement before the Murrayfield encounter a week ago. Perhaps this was not so strange after all. The Scotland v Ireland match was always the poor relation of the Five Nations' fixture list, though it will now be rivalled by some of the Italian encounters.

In a way, it was fortunate that the match had not been built up beforehand. At half-time, dear old Bill McLaren, who evidently regards himself as an unpaid PRO for Rugby Union football as well as a BBC commentator, said it had been "exciting''. I have had more excitement out of a bag of chips. Nevertheless, it was not without its interest for the rest of the season.

The chief lesson to be drawn, I thought, was that the Lions' tour of Australia had exacted an even heavier toll on both the fitness and the morale of the players than we had thought when it came to an end. True, Malcolm O'Kelly and Jeremy Davidson did not exactly have marvellous trips (any more than Scott Murray did either). But Brian O'Driscoll and Keith Wood had been crucial to the Lions' effort.

Rob Henderson had done everything asked of him in Australia and a bit more, but was injured for the Scotland match. O'Driscoll and Wood were playing. No doubt it is possible for such experienced centres as James McLaren and John Leslie to cut down O'Driscoll's operations, as happened at Murrayfield with the exception of one break; all the more so in view of the crazed decision of the Ireland coach, Warren Gatland, to play a wing at inside-centre instead of Henderson, when he had a perfectly good substitute available in Kevin Maggs, who did in fact come on as a replacement.

But if it is possible, though never easy, to suppress a centre like O'Driscoll, it is more difficult to give the same treatment to a hooker like Wood: not so much because Wood is Wood as because a front-row forward on the rampage, as Wood never was, is harder to corral than a three-quarter in what used to be the wide open spaces but now looks increasingly like Oxford Circus in the rush hour.

Martyn Madden demonstrated this truth in the Saturday's Leicester v Llanelli European Cup tie. I hope, incidentally, that if Madden comes into contention for the Wales team, we do not hear the familiar cry that he cannot be considered seriously because his "scrummaging is suspect'' – even if at Welford Road he was presumably helped by the presence on the other side of the front row by John Davies, who is a very strong scrummager indeed (though he now tends to come on for half the match or less, as he did not do on this occasion).

It is not entirely the fault of Graham Henry, the former Lions and still the present Wales coach, that his players have returned in such a subdued state from their Australian adventure, but he must accept much of the blame. Clearly, he worked his squad too hard, contriving to injure several of them fairly comprehensively. Worse, he worked them hard – as if they were inhabitants of one of that country's original penal colonies – to no purpose that they could discern because they were not picked for the matches.

The consequences are that Scott Gibbs has retired, partly because of his treatment by Henry. Relations between Henry and Neil Jenkins are probably irreparable, while Colin Charvis still possesses a sense of injustice. As the poet Robert Browning wrote: "Never glad confident morning again!"