Gavin Hastings was still an international rookie when he got his first taste of playing for The British & Irish Lions.
By the time he hung up his boots, the Scotland great had gone on two memorable Tours, captained the side and written his name into the history books.
Before he first toured with the Lions though, Hastings was selected for the 1986 match against ‘the Rest’ played in Cardiff, a game organised with no tour of South Africa due to apartheid.
Hastings recalled: “Maybe we didn’t quite appreciate what it represented and what it stood for because it was my first season of international rugby. As a result, I was just more interested in keeping my place in the Scotland team.
“Then they picked this side because there was no way we were going on a tour to South Africa because of apartheid. We met a couple of days before the game, as we did then, and there was no real preparation. We went and played the game in Cardiff and that was the end of it almost.
“It was only a number of years later that a number of people that had played in that game asked for it to be given greater recognition and quite rightly so. Essentially the team was selected on the basis of who had performed the best in the Five Nations. They had picked a best of the home nations team from the Five Nations.”
Three years on, and the Lions were touring once more, this time to Australia for a first-standalone tour of the country.
For Hastings, now 27 and entering his prime, the months leading up to the Tour were spent sweating over selection because of a troublesome groin.
He explained: “My particular situation, I got injured, I was down in London, working there and playing for London Scottish. I had missed the whole of that Five Nations season with a groin strain.
“I’d been training like a badger, running in straight lines. There was a fitness guy who I went to see who said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you there’ and he had me running.
“Peter Dods had replaced me for Scotland and played very well in that 1989 season for Scotland. I thought ‘Bloody hell, am I going to be struggling to get a place?’.
“But Ian McGeechan said: ‘provided you can prove your fitness, then I think we’ll take you’.
“I played three or four games and was selected. I was obviously delighted to be selected and there were about 10 or 11 Scots on the tour party, which I think was a good reflection of where we were.
“It was massively exciting because of that whole tour party, only a couple of guys had toured before, which was six years earlier. It was the first time that we were going to Australia in its own right.
“We had that really good mix of good old-fashioned touring and taking the rugby very seriously as you would expect with a Lions side. It was an amazing experience and one that I look back on with a huge amount of pride and it’s right up there with my greatest rugby experiences.”
It has now been 35 years since that famous Tour, with Finlay Calder captaining the Lions as they came back from losing the first Test to win the series – still the only team to have achieved that feat.
For Hastings, the defining moment came not during the Test series itself, but in a midweek clash with ACT after the first Test defeat.
He said: “We had won all our provincial games going into the first Test and we were very confident. We went out there expecting to win and it was extraordinary, we got absolutely hammered in that first Test.
“We were shell-shocked. We resolved there and then that we would put the tour together. We went down to Canberra the following Tuesday for a tour game and we were struggling at half-time.
“We were not playing well but the second-half performance was terrific. They won the game very well in the end and that got the tour back up and running.”
From that point onwards, the Lions were able to swing the momentum back in their favour, winning a brutal second Test 19-12 before Ieuan Evans’ famous try in the decider in the 19-18 win in Sydney.
“We went into the second Test and had what became known as the Battle of Ballymore,” said Hastings.
“It was a big boxing match and the English forwards, and Fin Calder, the captain, felt they had been a bit too soft with the Aussies so they decided they were going to do something about it.
“We sorted that out and we won the game. Then it’s all to play for in the third Test, we were probably pretty battle-hardened by then and we were determined to win and so we did. It was a bloody good Australia side that two years later went onto win the second World Cup. They had the vast majority of those players playing against the Lions so it was no mean feat to beat them in tests two and three.”
Four years later, Hastings got the nod to lead the team, following in the footsteps of compatriot Calder, as the Lions toured New Zealand.
With his experience of 1989, and having led Scotland, Hastings was a logical choice, and tried to learn from Calder. But Hastings also admits that there is only so much you can take from tour to tour.
He said: “Finlay Calder, my fellow Scotsman was the captain of the Lions in 1989, he had only captained Scotland that season. He has got this amazing charisma about him, he got the English forwards, the majority of whom played in the Tests, especially the two we won, he got them motivated and playing for each other. He led by example.
“The one lesson I took from Fin was that he would be first at training, he would lead the way on the field of play. But it wasn’t everything, he would delegate as well.
“You never quite know, because the amazing thing about the Lions tour is what was successful on the previous tour, you are in a completely different country and a completely different set of players, probably with a different coaching set-up and managerial set-up and a different backroom staff. The occasion is different so you can’t necessarily replicate what was successful on the previous Tour.”
The Lions narrowly lost the Test series in 1993 to the All Blacks, but by the time he returned home, Hastings had moved up to fourth in the all-time points charts for the Lions with 192 points.
So when it comes to the captaincy in 2025, what is the key quality Hastings believes is necessary?
“You need a huge amount of resilience, you just have to be expecting that things are not going to go your way,” he said.
“Unquestionably you have to be worthy of your place in the starting Test team. You have to have the respect of your peers. Clearly, the team that performs best in the autumn Tests and in the forthcoming Six Nations, the captain of the home nation that does the best, and if there is a team that wins the Triple Crown and beats all the other teams, then that captain puts themselves in the best position.”
