An hour before kick-off, and I’m beginning to wonder if watching the first Test at Ballymena RFC was such a bright idea. It’s only me and the girl working the bar, and she doesn’t have a strong opinion on whether or not Tom Curry should be playing No 7. “Which paper did you say you were with, the Ballymena Guardian?” No, it’s the other Guardian, I say. “Oh, the Antrim one.”
Just about the time I was beginning to think that all of Ballymena’s thousand-or-so members must have been among the tens of thousands going the other way into Portrush for the Open, they began to trickle in, one, two, three, four dozen, and more.
Soon enough everyone’s comparing the vintages of their Lions jerseys. There’s one from ’01, another from ’05, a few from 2013, and a couple of little kids, more interested in playing their own game than following the one on the TV, have the 2025 edition.
They’re too young to understand anything much about the match except that it matters to the adults. The Lions is an idea that gets passed on from one generation to the next, follow it back long enough and you’ll end up at to two men who were born and bred in this very club, Willie John McBride and Syd Millar, who did as much as anyone to make the team into what they are today.
Millar, the son of a butcher, and McBride, the son of a farmer, were both Ballymena men. There’s a wood-panelled room upstairs in the clubhouse which is named after them. It’s filled with their memorabilia. They played, coached, managed, and chaired nine Lions tours between them, and led the legendary 1974 tour, when Millar was coach and McBride captain of the team that went unbeaten in South Africa.
There’s a huge picture of McBride in the moment after the third Test all along one wall, signed by every one of his squad. When Scott Quinnell visited here four years ago, he broke down in tears standing in front of it. “Attitude is the first thing a Lions team needs to have,” Millar said. “If the attitude is right, the other things fall into place.”
Downstairs, the Lions’ attitude seems to be shaping up just fine. They are 10-0 up already, and the sting has already gone from the game. Truth is, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of jeopardy on this tour. Most people in the bar seem worried for Australia, who are in the unfamiliar position of being seen as easy-beats. “I’d hoped the Wallabies would give them more of a game than this,” says the man on the next barstool along. Turns out he has a Lions jersey of his own at home, 1989 vintage, although he’s not wearing it. “But then,” he says, “I was only a midweek player.”
Stevie, as they all call Steve Smith, was the reserve hooker for Finlay Calder’s Lions team, who came back from 1-0 down to beat Australia. “I played against his da’,” he says, watching the young Tom Lynagh on TV. Smith has the look of a man who’s done some hard living. Maybe his busted knuckles are still recovering from the time he knocked out four of Sean Fitzpatrick’s teeth.
He still seems a little in awe of McBride. “They were big shoes to fill.” But he loves Millar, who gave him a break by picking him for the Barbarians when he had been banned from playing for Ulster because of his misadventures on tour.
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But then everyone here owes a lot to Millar. He even came back to serve as the club rep after he finished his four-year stint as the chair of the International Rugby Board (now World Rugby). They say he used to give the union hell in the provincial committee meetings. When the French decided to award him the Legion d’honneur, they asked if he would fly out to Paris for the ceremony. No, Millar, told them, but you’re welcome to come here, and we can do it upstairs in the Ballymena clubhouse.
In Millar’s day Ballymena were the best club in Ulster, and Ulster were the best team in Ireland. Smith was part of the Ulster team that beat the Wallabies during their famous grand slam tour in 1984, 15-12 at Ravenhill, “a better Australian side than this one”, I say, and he doesn’t disagree. When Ulster won the Heineken Cup in 1998-99 they had 15 Ballymena players in the squad. No wonder the club won the all-Ireland title a few years later.
It’s different now. This is the first time in 20 years there’s not an Ulsterman on tour with the Lions, but no one’s complaining, Ulster are on their uppers, three million in debt and third-bottom in the URC. At Ballymena, too, there are members who ask why the club aren’t winning like they used to.
But back then McBride, Millar, Smith, Trevor Ringland and all the rest of the international players used to turn out for the club at every opportunity. These days their best young players get funnelled into the professional system, and they don’t see them again till they’re spat out the other end. They even took down a photograph of one of their more recent international players because he had never actually turned out for them, only been registered to the club by the governing body.
So Ballymena’s changing. They’ve become a community hub, and a participation club, with five adult sides, and a full slate in age groups, and a side for players with learning disabilities. “The Lions built this club,” Smith tells me. “It put us on the map.” But it’s true, I say back to him, that once upon a time a couple of men from this club built the Lions, too.
