Gerald Davies, the manager of the 2009 Lions, challenged one of the orthodoxies of modern sport on Tuesday. Giving the inaugural IRB lecture, on the theme of the Lions and the spirit of the game, Davies said that winning should not mean so much that lives are ruined.

In a year that has given rugby “Bloodgate”, athletics a conflict over gender and motor racing the revelation of a deliberate crash in Formula One, Davies, speaking at Rugby School, birthplace of rugby union, used the outcome of the 2009 Lions series in South Africa as justification for his approach to sport. The Lions lost the series to the Springboks 2-1, but, in what they did for rugby, felt more like winners than failures.

“Winning cannot be everything, cannot be the only thing,” Davies told his audience, among them five of the nine players to be added to the IRB’s hall of fame. “Winning can be, and is, the first thing when the starting whistle blows; it is, and must be, the ambition or why else play the game?

“The Lions this year lost. We had other hopes for our journey but we went first of all in search of victory. In that ambition we failed and we were sorry, but we had other hopes, too, in which we achieved much.”

Davies believes that every player who toured in the summer came home enthused by what had been achieved and that the game’s followers should be enthused, too. He acknowledged the violence of the second international in Pretoria, after which five Lions players had to go to hospital. “That test was described as brutal, as if this were a compliment,” he said. “Is not the game becoming overtly violent? And to what extent do we, the authorities, turn a blind eye to certain aspects of the game?”

That violence has led commentators to question whether children should be exposed to rugby, but, in that regard, Davies was optimistic. He would encourage his grandchildren to play, since that was the motivation for the game as a whole. “To make the game attractive to young people so that they want to join in; without this there is no one to play the game,” Davies said.

The degree of violence in modern rugby has long been on the agenda at the IRB’s medical conference in Lensbury, Middlesex, next month, as will be a study of the incidence of injuries that have already made an impact on the international series to be played in Europe during November.

There is concern, too, about the number of times the scrum has to be reset, which during a recent game in the Tri-Nations Series was found to have cost 17 minutes of playing time.

“To what extent are we prepared to allow play to drift away from the laws of the game as they are written?” Davies asked, a theme taken up by Ian McGeechan, head coach of the 2009 Lions and one of the inductees to the hall of fame alongside Bill MacLagan, Cliff Morgan, Tony O’Reilly, Syd Millar and Willie John McBride, all famous Lions, and three Springboks, Barry Heatlie, Bennie Osler and Frik du Preez.

McGeechan said that rugby has always been a collision sport but that if referees applied the law, the breakdown area would be less destructive and there would be greater fluidity. “Technically, you have to be good in that area to be effective and that’s where the Lions scored so heavily in South Africa,” he said. “That’s what we need to discover at home.”

• Martin Johnson, the England team manager, allowed four players to return to their clubs on Tuesday so that they can play in the Guinness Premiership this weekend.

Ben Kay and Richard Blaze, return to Leicester, while the strength in depth at wing and in the back row means that Johnson is happy to release David Strettle and Steffon Armitage to Harlequins and London Irish respectively.

The fate of Birmingham & Solihull, the Championship club, who went into voluntary liquidation yesterday, will be discussed by the RFU’s management board today.

Ireland have left Malcolm O’Kelly and Girvan Dempsey out of their squad for the autumn internationals.