You have to compare and contrast what the British & Irish Lions are going to be playing against over the three Tests against South Africa.
If you look at Victor Matfield and Bakkies Botha, they are a perfect complement for each other. Botha does the hard stuff: the enforcement, the big serious tackling, the counter-rucking, the rucking, and the labouring, while Matfield does the aerial dynamics and the beautiful stuff - he wanders round and gets out in midfield, kicks the ball, has wonderful hands, and offloads brilliantly.
Paul O’Connell and Alun Wyn Jones are very much the same kind of player though. If you look at who they play with in the national set-ups, O’Connell has Donncha O’Callaghan, who does all of the hard work, and the same thing for Ian Gough.
I’d prefer to see O’Callaghan in there with O’Connell or even Nathan Hines as that would bring some balance to the second row.
O’Connell is captain and it would make sense to play someone that is a little bit different to him. He (O’Connell) is not playing particularly well on the tour so far and he might be a victim of try-harder-syndrome, where you are trying to kick-start a bit of form and you know you are just a little bit away.
He has started almost to get in the way - he thinks that he needs to generate a bit of form, so he thinks that he has to get on the ball. He stands out in midfield and he shouldn’t be there, but he takes the ball on, he does it on a singular basis, he gets isolated – okay he hasn’t been turned over that much – but the ball comes back very slowly. Alun-Wyn Jones is actually a better player at doing that.
When Jones carries the ball, he does it in such a way that the ball comes back quickly or else he offloads. O’Connell is a little bit one dimensional, he goes to ground very quickly and maybe he should relegate himself to a position where he does all the labouring work and the unfashionable stuff.