A big call!
While they finished with a dud loss to the Wallabies on Saturday, the Lions have come away from a Australia as 2-1 winners of the 2025 series.
It won’t go down as one of the finest Tours in their history or one of their strongest teams, but their were a handful of outstanding individual, who proved themselves once again at the top level of the game.
Despite this, Murray Mexted, who played for the All Blacks during the 1970s and 80s, made a big claim that no Lions player would make a current World XV.
Speaking on the DSPN podcast, he said: “The Wallabies won 60 minutes of the second Test, and they looked the better side [in the third]. I actually don’t think that this Lions team is very good.
“There are a couple of things here. What is the level of the Australian rugby team at the moment? And that’ll give you sort of a gauge on what this Lions side is, and then think about how many of those Lions players would make a World XV?
“If you named a World XV which included players from South Africa and New Zealand and everywhere else for that matter… how many of those Lions players would make it? I’ve looked at the team two or three times and I can’t see one of them.”
As is the case most of the time with broad statements like this, Mexted does not back up his point by telling us his World XV.
It would be interesting to know who he would put ahead of Dan Sheehan and Tadhg Beirne, while there are strong cases to be made for Finn Russell and Tadhg Furlong.
The likes of Ellis Genge, Andrew Porter, Tom Curry, and Jamison Gibson-Park would not be far off World XVs either.
