In the end, he went for a touring squad boasting 15 men from his own Irish side, 13 Englishmen, eight Scots and just two Welsh for a ten-match tour that will start against Argentina in Dublin on June 20th and end against Australia in Sydney on August 2nd. Connacht, with the selections of Mack Hansen and Bundee Aki, will actually have as many tourists as the entire Principality which hasn’t been this peripheral to a Lions tour since the last shots were fired in World War II. Changed times. The green brigade is the biggest ever named. It trumps by one the number chosen by Warren Gatland in 2009 ,but that posse shrunk to just eleven active participants between the jigs and the reels of injuries and suspensions. A salutary warning there for anyone in need of it. “It's definitely gonna happen,” said Farrell. “I mean, that's a story that runs through Lions history, isn't it? It's gonna happen. It does time and time again. You start off with a massive list and shorten down. So we know the type people that we're talking about. It depends what it is that we need. “Do we need a blend of a player that can play a couple different positions? Is there a player that's carrying a bit of an injury and might need to manage it within training? Is there a guy that might be over for three weeks, but he's definitely worth taking? Is it leadership that we need? We'll see.” Caelan Doris can already speak for the late curveball. Tipped as a strong contender for the captaincy from far out, the Leinster and Ireland skipper didn’t even make the 38 names revealed here thanks to the shoulder injury that seems to have ended his season against Northampton last week. Maro Itoje has been handed the armband and this, allied to the fact that England are only two shy of Ireland’s representation, is no small thing given what had been the rising angst on this side of the Irish Sea with the greening of the Lions. Farrell came to London this week having already loaded his coaching staff with employees of the IRFU: Simon Easterby, John Fogarty, Andrew Goodman, Aled Evans. Even the S&C lead and the comms teams were heavily sourced in Dublin. That Ireland have a couple more players than an England team that (just) finished above them in the recent Six Nations table won’t sit well with some on this side of the Irish Sea, but the form guide over the last number of years backs up that representation. And it’s not that Farrell and his lieutenants didn’t give that Northampton defeat of Leinster due attention. The last selection meeting started on Wednesday morning at 8am and then broke the three o’clock barrier before it was done. It all started last December with an initial list of 74 men, and got whittled to a point where they thought they knew 90% of those travelling, before Henry Pollock was one of those who made a late burst from the fringes to centre stage. The 20-year old Saint made himself unignorable with his rise through the ranks for club and country in recent months, but Farrell was happy to take things case by case. So it is that a number of players carrying injuries have been given the nod. James Ryan, who hasn’t played in nearly two months, will make the trip. So will Mack Hansen, Sione Tuipulotu, Huw Jones and Blair Kinghorn, the latter of those being the only player domiciled in France to be given the call. Kinghorn will fly to Oz only when Toulouse’s Top 14 duties are done. And so to those unlucky few. Or the 36, to be more precise. No Owen Farrell. No Jamie George, George Ford or Courtney Lawes. No Sam Prendergast, Jack Crowley or Robbie Henshaw. But then, as Farrell said, we have another six weeks and plenty of rugby to get through before that plane departs. Farrell talked of wiggle room that was built-in to a squad that numbers 38 as things stand. The roughly 1,500 punters who paid in to the Indigo here will mushroom to a predicted 40,000-strong invasion come the real thing in Australia. This is only the beginning.