How the Lions won the battle of the big men in Cape Town
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Isolation is a breeding ground for uncertainty and anxiety. If there is one lesson to be learned from the last 18 months, that is it.
Wind back the clock 47 years to South Africa in 1974, and it was not so very different. With apartheid still dictating the social and political mores of the country, South Africa was a nation divided, and an international pariah.
Sport in the republic was isolated from the rest of the world: the Springboks did not play a single international match between their game against England at Ellis Park on June 3, 1972, and the first Test against the touring British and Irish Lions at Newlands a full two years and five days later.