According to the Daily Mail, the one-week ban handed out to Lions rugby player Nathan Hines for a spear tackle has "reopened wounds" of the Lions 2005 tour to New Zealand. I'm not sure that it has, but there are papers to sell and nothing sells like controversy and delicious tears of pain. Mm, your tears taste so sweet to me.
It's a tenuous thread that links the Brian O'Driscoll tackle of 2005 with the Nathan Hines tackle of 2009. There is absolutely no similarity whatsover and it seems the writer's gripe is that one player was banned and the others were not. This happens in most sports on a regular basis and is part of, shall we say, the drama.
The next sob, which I call the Kiwi Konnection, is just plain laughable. To imply there's an insidious conspiracy to bugger the Lions rugby team by New Zealanders means the writer is one paranoid story away from the loony bin.
I'm sure it was pure coincidence the citing commissioner was a Kiwi; besides, it was a Canadian judicial officer who imposed the ban. And to be perfectly honest, if we really wanted to take a Lions player out of action Nathan Hines would be well down the list: we'd probably go for O'Driscoll again ....
Still, like I said, I bet they sold a shit load of papers today.
