Watch every second of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry live and on demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\nA makeshift New Zealand side, with only three players backing up from last Saturday’s Test victory over South Africa on the same ground, involved all six injury replacements summoned on tour \u2014 including two players who arrived on Monday \u2014 plus a debut for prop Saula Ma’u.<\/p>\n
But their defence struggled as the visitors trailed 14-0 after seven minutes, were down by four at halftime and found themselves behind 35-17 in the 47th minute.<\/p>\n
The Lions threatened to become the first South African provincial side to beat New Zealand since Orange Free State, now known as the Cheetahs, 50 years ago in 1976.<\/p>\n
But like the Stormers, Sharks and Bulls, who’d already been beaten by the All Blacks, the Lions were out of season and not match-fit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They hadn’t played since May 30 in the United Rugby Championship quarter-finals and it showed as the New Zealanders stormed back in the last half-hour with four successive tries.<\/p>\n
Two came from Rieko Ioane, a second for flanker Ethan Blackadder that gave them the lead for the first time in the 62nd minute, and a decisive second by winger Emoni Narawa in the 79th minute that settled the tourists’ nerves.<\/p>\n
“At times we tried to play too much. The Lions kicked a lot more than us and benefited from that. We controlled some areas well, but were just not clinical enough,” coach Dave Rennie said.
“We created a lot of opportunities but just did not do the obvious enough times.
<\/p>\n
“At 35-17 down we were feeling the heat, but we had quite a few Test caps on the park and quite a few young men. We dug deep.
<\/p>\n
“The Lions were off to flying starts in both halves and I thought we showed a lot of character to fight back.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A dogged Lions side that led for more than an hour have finally been worn down and pipped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":868432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[10751,64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-868431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-all-blacks","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=868431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/868432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=868431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=868431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=868431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}