Product Description

It will be remembered as one of the great test series in rugby history as the British and Irish Lions came within millimetres of defeating World Champions South Africa on their own turf.

In the land of the big game hunter, this was one that got away just! Three pulsating Test matches of ferocious intensity, compelling and controversial at almost every turn.

Ian McGeechan's heroic squad were decimated by injuries throughout the tour but still claimed a magnificent final Test win in the Springboks' Ellis Park fortress.

The first Test in Durban was lost 26-21 despite a stirring late comeback. The Lions had to win in Pretoria and did everything in their power in a brutal but breathtaking collision. Rob Kearney's early try and Stephen Jones' faultless kicking carried the tourists to the cusp of a magnificent triumph - only for Lion hearts to be broken in the final seconds by the long range boot of the nerveless Morne Steyn.

Paul O'Connell's side regrouped and responded emphatically in Johannesburg, thrashing the Boks 26-9, scoring three tries to none. The series was lost but the performance said everything about this pride of Lions. With action from every game of the tour, extended highlights of the first two Tests plus a bonus disc of the extraordinary final Test match in full - this is the Lions in South Africa 2009.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #736 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-09-07
• Rating: Exempt
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 200 minutes

Synopsis
Includes all the best highlights from the British and Irish Lion's 2009 tour of South Africa.

Customer Reviews

Highlights?
Highlights?

I'm not sure who this DVD is aimed at - certainly not anyone interesting in learning anything about this monumental Lions tour. The highlights of the warm up games are necessarily brief, but that, I hoped, would just give more space for a fuller treatment of the Tests. Not so - the three Tests on the first DVD are given perfunctory treatment, highlights involving no more than one phase leading to a try, or more often to a penalty infringement and the subsequent kick at goal. In a series where set scrums played, I think, a decisive role, we hardly see one. The decisive move to uncontested scrums in the Second test slips in unnoticed and unmentioned.

How to do it better? First, why on earth waste a valuable chunk of the first DVD with highlights of the Third Test when it is there in full on the second DVD. Cut that, and you could have given more time for the first two tests - perhaps enough to show how the games developed.

Second, spend a few bucks on adding some commentary - just enough to point out where things had changed between one clip and the next. Using the real-time commentary alone is just lazy. And would it have killed the producers to put the game clock in the corner of the screen - a glance to see whether the action you are viewing is taking place in the middle of the game or at the end would have been particularly helpful in the warm-up games.

So, sadly, we are left with a DVD that reduces what I remember as some of the most intense, committed and emotional sporting action I have ever seen to a series of un-related 20 second clips.

And why the third test in full, not the decisive second? Obviously because the Lions won that one, even though it was, to an extent, a dead rubber. I guess this answers my initial question - this is a DVD for British boys to buy their Dads for Christmas, to spend a few minutes admiring the great breaks made by Rob Kearney et al. Not one for me - now, where do I find Tests 1 and 2 complete?

Not the best i've seen!!!
Very dissapointed in this DVD, game highlights are very brief, not enough footage of the 1st and 2nd tests. Very poor compared to the 2001 & 2005 tour DVD's.

It is what it says it is.
Like it says on the tin... Match highlights of all the tour games, extended highlights of the first two tests and the full 3rd test.

Couple of things, the match highlights of the games against the clubs, don't show the yellow cards... Not that I'm after watching players getting booked, but sin binnings as they are tend to have an outcome on the game is all. Not a big gripe, just an observation.

All the commentary is the SA based Super Sports feed, and not Sky's. Not a bad thing at all, as Saffer commentary tends to be fairly complementary all round, and refreshing different at times. Hugh Bladen is the southern Hemispheres Bill Mclaren, and the only man on the planet capable of stretching out a players last name for the full length of time it takes him to run the length of the field to score.

Whilst the 3rd test was a big win for the Lions and I can see why a DVD marketed directly at Lions fans would have it, I can't help but think they should have put the 2nd test in as the full game. "We" lost it, but it was a much, much better game... As excruciating as that was.