Crushed by waves of Covid and unrest, the country hosting the Lions isn’t doing its best marketing job
Hindsight is a marvellous superpower, and one much in evidence as the countdown begins to the first rugby Test match between the Springboks and British & Irish Lions in a little over a week.
The Covid- and lockdown-battered SA tourism and hospitality industry was never going to benefit much materially from a Lions tour with games played in empty stadiums and foreign visitors few and far between, but the marketing opportunity to entice post-pandemic tourists should have been worth something.
As recently as a couple of months ago, it was by no means certain that the 2021 Lions tour to SA would go ahead as planned. There was a strong push for it to be postponed or for the games to be moved to the UK, where they seemed more likely to take place in front of fans.
Barring further calamity — a statement that can no longer be made with the confidence of the past — next Saturday’s Test will take place as scheduled in Cape Town. It will be one to remember, albeit for the wrong reasons. A fan-free stadium and undercooked Springbok team is unlikely to make for a spectacle that will delight SA fans, but it will be a rugby Test on SA soil, the first in more months than many Covid-befuddled brains can remember.
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