Was the 2025 Lions series a missed opportunity for Australia?
The Ruck
Reynolds Alfie
3.4 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 2025 British & Irish Lions tour to Australia ended with one of the most bizarre test matches!
Biblical rainfall and a thunderstorm delayed proceedings before Australia won the match in Sydney. Will Kelleher and Alex Lowe join Alfie Reynolds to round up the occasion and the series as a whole.
They ask whether Australia were under-prepared for the first test and how much that cost them in the three game series? Is a 2-1 series victory for the Lions an accurate reflection of how good they are? And, what on earth was going on when play was stopped early in the second half?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And just like that, the 2025 Lions Tour is done and dusted. Welcome back to The Ruck, the journalist's rugby podcast from The Times and the Sunday Times. I'm Alfie Reynolds, Will Kelleher, Alex Lowe in another empty stadium later than usual, 20 to 1 in the morning, all thanks to a lightning delay for one of the most bizarre |
| 0:20.9 | lions test matches that I think we will ever see. Will Alex, what a weird end to the |
| 0:25.4 | tour. That's an insane chaos and actually we're looking out over the Acoast |
| 0:29.9 | Stadium at the moment and it's still raining and hilariously they're watering the pitch |
| 0:33.8 | as if they needed to. They're spraying off the lines that got repainted twice in yellow |
| 0:39.3 | because the referees couldn't see them. |
| 0:41.3 | It looks completely waterlogged on the side of the field. |
| 0:43.8 | Like this weather in Sydney has been awful since Wednesday, Alex, hasn't it? |
| 0:47.1 | Which has been disappointing for sort of like going to the beach and stuff. |
| 0:50.0 | But it made for an absolutely ridiculously memorable test match, didn't it? |
| 0:55.2 | Yeah, it did. |
| 0:56.5 | When we were here for the Waratars game, we came in on the back of a rain bomb, they call it, |
| 1:02.0 | a weather bomb. |
| 1:02.4 | Cyclone bomb. |
| 1:03.4 | Yeah, basically a cyclone, which led to the sort of rather kind of pantomime story of Andy Farrell suggesting |
| 1:08.6 | that the Waratars had overwatered the pitch to make it a bit |
| 1:11.7 | too slick. Well, yeah, the gods overwatered the pitch today. It was absolutely torrential to the |
| 1:18.1 | point where it was actually hard to see the other side of the pitch. It was very hard to identify |
| 1:22.7 | players at times. But yeah, you're right. One of the most memorable games I've been to and even without the |
| 1:28.6 | lightning break I loved it I loved the contest I I just wish this wallabies team that we've seen |
| 1:35.2 | the last two weeks had turned up one week one way why they what what a series it would have been and |
| 1:40.0 | it was one of those games that we were doing the live blog and at one point I just I just like |
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