Rugby Union: Carling's growth in adversity: Chris Rea watches England's captain come to terms with tour tribulations

PART crusade, part schoolboy trip was how a Lions tour was once perfectly described. On this tour, as we now know, the crusaders play on Saturdays, the schoolboys in midweek.

On reflection, that is libellous to schoolboys, who could not have been as spineless as the Lions were at Napier last Tuesday. Despite the indignant protestations to the contrary by the tour management, it is patently obvious that a number of the players have already run up the white flag. Ian McGeechan has been bitterly hurt. Moral fibre is as important as talent on a tour such as this, but the signs are that one or two members of this party have neither.

Will Carling, on the other hand, has shown that he has an abundance of both. No one would claim that he has had the happiest of tours. After five years of almost undiluted success, a little rain has fallen into the life of England's captain. Of course there have been disappointments in the past. The loss of a Grand Slam at Murrayfield in 1990 and the failure to win a third successive Grand Slam last season, but nothing as personal as the misfortunes he has suffered since England's defeat by Wales in Cardiff.

Up to then Carling was the sole candidate for the Lions' captaincy. Not even an explosive Five Nations' campaign by Gavin Hastings and his fast-rising maturity as Scotland's captain could disturb the conviction among the majority of Lions' selectors that Carling was the man to lead in New Zealand. But at least one influential member of the selection panel was beginning to have doubts.

The choice of Hastings turned out to be inspired. This has been his tour, not Carling's, which cannot have been easy for a player with Carling's history of success to accept.

With the loss of the Lions' captaincy went, no doubt, a little self esteem as well as the status accorded to the captain. No longer would he enjoy the comfort and privacy of his own room which, for a man as private as Carling, was a major privilege denied. He would have to immerse himself in the emotional and hygenic disarray of touring and to live in the often strained proximity of others, some of them soul-mates, others with whom the only bond was the room they shared. For once, he would not occupy centre stage at lunches, dinners, embassy receptions and after-match functions. And above all his voice would not be heard at selection meetings.

Carling has had to come to terms with all this while battling a severe loss of form. New Zealand is not everyone's idea of paradise. It can be thoroughly inhospitable both on and off the field. Reputations count for nothing here, and at the start of the tour Carling's manner was often misunderstood by the locals who had interpreted his shyness as arrogance. David Duckham, another very private Englishman, and one who achieved greatness on the 1971 tour, experienced much the same hostility.

Carling did, at least, have the satisfaction of winning a Test place at Christchurch. But by the time of the Hawkes Bay game at Napier last Tuesday, his tour and perhaps even his rugby career hung in the balance. There are few things to match the loneliness and frustration of a player, miles from home, trying to recapture his form. To his eternal credit, Carling has never stopped trying. There have been times when he has been trying too hard. But the openings would not be forged, and the breaks, as so often happens, were all bad ones. You just knew that when he failed to get to the pitch of the ball against Auckland last Saturday the bounce would make a monkey out of him.

Stripped of his dignity and his form this gifted young man looked so vulnerable and forlorn that even the most partisan Aucklander must have felt a stab of sympathy.

Carling played at Napier with a shoulder injury which, had it not been for the need to rest Jeremy Guscott and Scott Gibbs, would have forced his withdrawal. But by taking the field and by sacrificing his personal ambition for the team, Carling, like Sydney Carton, may reflect that it was a far, far better thing than he has ever done. His game that afternoon rose above the ruins of the Lions' forward play, and although it was not enough to survive the challenge of Gibbs, it lifted Carling to new heights in the estimation of supporters and critics alike.

(Photograph omitted)