The mighty British and Irish Lions have temporarily unified the fighting forces of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England for a blockbusting three Test tour of Australia, but they tug heartstrings in all sorts of quirky directions inside the four walls of Herbert’s family home.

“My son Charlie, who is 12 next week, said to me ‘dad, who do we cheer for?’’ said Herbert, a former champion Wallaby centre now Rugby Australia chairman.

“I said, ‘Well, what’s your nationality? He said “I’m Australian but won’t that leave mum on her own to cheer for the Lions?’’

“I said, ‘no, there’ll be about 40 odd thousand of them over here … she’ll have plenty of company.’’

Here’s the catch. Herbert’s wife Serena is Irish and while she may have spent more of her life in Australia than Ireland the British Lions aura is a seductive force.

Herbert went to the 1999 World Cup in the British Isles never sensing it was the time to propose to his Irish girlfriend who he once playfully serenaded by saying he had “a house with four bedrooms and a pool’’ in Brisbane even though he lived with his parents.

But he suddenly changed course.

“I just couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think of anything else. I just knew it had to be now.’’

Herbert, producing an Irish Claddagh ring set with Serena’s emerald birthstone, got down on bended knee on a beach by the Irish Sea and with a settled mind helped Australia beat Ireland in a Test two days later.

“With the Lions, Serena will go for whoever wins, but I think in her heart, as soon as she sees Ireland compete in anything, she becomes very Irish and she gets a very thick Irish accent which she doesn’t normally have.’’

The Herbert’s are simply one of thousands of families spread across five nations who will be engrossed in a series which will has become …

THE LIFE-SAVER

The simple facts are this Lions tour, which features a sold out first Test at Suncorp Stadium on July 19, is a potential lifesaver for Australian rugby which a couple of years ago was broke.

In November, 2023, rugby announced it has been given an $80 million line of credit and this April announced a $36.8 million deficit.

But, with the soaring profits of this tour, rugby is confident of being debt free by 2026.

“There has been roughly 500,000 tickets sold. It is the biggest Lions tour ever,’’ said Herbert, also chief executive of Strata management firm SSKB.

“More than 40,000 fans in red will hit Brisbane. They will drink their body weight in lager.

“This tour gives us a chance to wipe out that debt. We took the 80 million line of credit and have drawn down to about 60 (million).

“We’ve got a home World Cup (in 2027), and we can put the code in a pretty good position, if we can realign the model which costs more than we generate to run it, and that’s been the problem since it went professional.

“We rely on these big events but you just can’t because the Lions won’t be back for 12 years. We have to reset the model.’’

MAD COW’S DISEASE

As Herbert prepares for his first mouthful of a sumptuous rump steak at the well regarded Boathouse at Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel, there is a playful question about a secret story I simply had to ask.

“Do you think your steak came from one of Tim Horan’s cows?’’ I ask as Herbert grins and floats back to a famous yarn about days when rugby players competed for pride and peanuts.

Before the game turned professional in 1995, players were not paid to play but could claim some small expenses and Wallaby great and farmer’s son Horan became legendary among his teammates for brazenly – and successfully – claiming agistment fees for cattle he (supposedly) owned.

It prompted a string of agistment fee requests from other players and had rugby bean counters asking things like “hang on, you live at Ashgrove … are the cattle in your backyard?’’

“I had two years of amateurism and I was glad to be part of both eras,’’ Herbert said.

“Did Tim actually own any cows? I’m not sure. There were some great stories.’’

Herbert’s older brother Anthony – who Daniel replaced in the Queensland team – was the Australian team’s unofficial fundraising chief and would sell spare tickets to raise money for the team.

“They’d put it all in the middle, divvy it up, depending on how many games you’ve played. Guys were away for six weeks and had mortgages so it all helped.

“I was on $50 a day but it felt like a King’s ransom. I was a kid. A student.

“Once Rod McCall secretly bet the entire kitty on Queensland to win a game in South Africa and they did.’’

In the innocent days when players were allowed to bet on themselves, McCall gave $10,000 to The Courier-Mail’s rugby doyen Jim Tucker to have on his Centrebet account at $2.75 for the Reds to win the 1994 Super Rugby final against Natal and the win expanded the pool to $27,500 with a profit of $17,500. Happy days.

PACKER’S COUP

Fancy going from feeling like royalty on $50 a day one year to being offered 5000 times as much the next.

This year is the 30th anniversary of Kerry Packer’s global bid to take control of world rugby via the World Rugby Corporation and Herbert reveals how close it came to succeeding before Rupert Murdoch outlaid $555 million to enable Australia, South Africa and New Zealand to form SANZAR.

It scuttled Packer’s project on the tarmac.

“Packer had 95 per cent of the players signed,’’ said Herbert. “My contract was worth about $US250,000 and my team was going to be based in Long Beach California.

“He wanted to crack America and rugby is still trying to do that. I just thought ‘wow’. What a great opportunity.

“This was in the early days of videoconferencing and we went into a room where the New Zealand players were on one screen and England on another. This went on for months. Not one thing leaked out.

“South Africa had just won the World Cup. Packer wanted them but the Murdoch side got going and got the South Africans and it just sort of collapsed.

“But rugby went professional almost overnight as a result of this and players were happy to sign with their own board’s so long as it went professional.’’

CHALLENGES AHEAD

Thirty years after turning professional, rugby union in Australia is still searching for a sustainable format which makes dollars and sense, rules which don’t clog up the game and is finding its niche in the ultra-competitive winter market with the AFL and rugby league.

Herbert says times limits on breaks in play have made a difference while a long line of Wallaby coaches have been bagged for diminishing results he senses it’s not so much their fault but the system around them that needed streamlining and that rugby’s global appeal would always be a great ally in keeping its best talent.

“You can do things in rugby you cannot do in other sports. You can travel the world, play top tier nations and get paid very well to do it.’’

But for the moment it’s all about the Lions.

“It’s going to be great. In the 2001 Lions tour here there were 15,000 Lions fans here and only one reported incident and that was two of them fighting together. They banter but don’t get into trouble. It’s the Ashes but bigger.’’

Bring it on …

Regatta Boathouse Steak ratings for the selected sirloin and rumps: 9.5.