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We are all packed up in Cape Town today for the flight up to Johannesburg and onward by car to Pretoria, all ready for the day when the tour bursts into extraordinary life, or begins to die a slow and rather lingering sporting death. There is absolutely nothing like the second of a three-Test series to set the pulse racing.

In passing, it struck me this morning to wonder why on earth we are in Cape Town in the first place. It is a fantastic city and there appears to be the first sign of a grip on the crime wave. But the Test is at altitude in Pretoria, the Lions have already been here once to play Western Province and it smacks of gross unfairness and political manoeuvring that we all had to traipse back here at a seminal time in the tour, just to fit in with what passes for South Africa's idea of an itinerary.

But by Saturday evening, will the series be over? The Lions have banished all talk and all memories of what was in some ways a near miss last week, and they know that they will have to be at least 20 points better tomorrow than they were then, purely because South Africa are bound to be better by around that margin. Surely, the likes of Fourie du Preez and Pierre Spies cannot be as eerily quiet in Pretoria as they were in Durban. Can they?

My instincts are slightly contradictory. Naturally, they are that South Africa should win, notably because they are bigger and more aggressive and better, by all the evidence we have seen so far. But my other instinct is that Ian McGeechan will have tricks up his sleeve, will try to change the game to drag it away from South African strengths and will come up with surprise plays, possibly even targeting South Africa in the areas where South Africa believe themselves to be invulnerable.

It is difficult not to take the part of the touring team on these occasions, not least because of an affection for the concept of the Lions and because of a sense of outrage at how badly they are treated, not only by their South African hosts, the silly fixture list and downbeat provincial games, but by their own kind at home.

If it is half as good a spectacle as last week, then it will be brilliant. And perhaps the late dash up to altitude will ensure that the Lions are not at too much of a disadvantage. How absolutely wonderful if all those thousands who are here to support the team, and all those other Lions fans watching back at home and in random parts of the world at large, see their heroes storm back and march on Johannesburg with the series still in the balance. It is unlikely, but it is categorically not impossible.

Awards for pomposity

You can always rely on the New Zealand Rugby Union whenever it comes to the issuing of pompous statements. Yesterday, it was revealed that Mathieu Bastareaud, the French centre who claimed that he was mugged in Wellington in the early hours of last Sunday, was merely covering up his embarrassment because when drunk, he had banged his head and cut himself.

When safely back in France, Bastareaud revealed the extent of his lie. The first reaction is clearly that police time must never be wasted, and that while it is unlikely that the Wellington police devoted a gigantic flying squad to the case, no doubt they were anxious to clear it up and therefore had to divert resources away from the solving of other crimes.

But Bastareaud is not quite the first rugby player to get into trouble after a match. And the pomposity of the statement by Steve Tew, chief executive of the Union, grates horribly. He droned on about the savage injury to the reputation of "rugby, Wellington and New Zealand", demanded some kind of action by the French Federation, who were absolutely blameless, and generally reacted as if Bastareaud had actually burned down the New Zealand Parliament.

The statement also appears to indicate that there has never been any crime in Wellington of an evening, and also that no New Zealand rugby players have ever got themselves into trouble. The truth is, of course, that an incredibly large number of leading New Zealand rugby players have been convicted of a whole variety of offences over the past five or six years, causing one New Zealand professional observer to wonder in print if there was not an alcohol problem in rugby which needed to be addressed.