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Two days after the game, I wrote a pathetically small story about him in The Times. The story was mainly factual, though it did opine that the options he took at the close of the game were “expensively unintelligent”. What I was not prepared for was the staggering weight of online response.

No one remotely agreed. Some, not all of them from the same corner of Ireland, thought the comment snide. Many, many others felt that “he should be apologising to all Lions fans” or that he was “a disgrace to the Lions shirt.” That sort of thing. It was the latter comment that surprised me.

A bloke screws up massively in what is arguably the biggest game of his life. It is one thing to point that out – and there are folk out there who get sensitive enough about that. It is quite another to kick him when he is down.

So I ask: how do you, the reader, want your villains? Do you want to give Ronan a hug, or would you like his effigy hanging from every pub from Croydon to Cork?

McGeechan was good, but not quite good enough

This is the problem with Ian McGeechan. He steered this Lions squad magnificently through South Africa and he deserved more than a series defeat. A series draw at the very least. His methods of managing the Lions challenge are both intelligent and deeply instinctive and, particularly now that he has declared his Lions career finished, we who sit in judgment have tended to laud him with praise. And pretty much all of it is entirely deserved.

However, while you can walk away from that Lions tour feeling emotionally drained, proud, hung-over, desperate for the next four years to pass so we can all head for Australia – whatever – there cannot be many Lions supporters who are not thinking: what if.

The biggest what-if, of course, is Schalk Burger. What if assistant referee Bryce Lawrence had called the eye-gouging right and called for Burger to be shown a red card rather than a yellow?

But two more. In that first Test, instead of waiting until the second half had started, what if the Adam Jones-for-Phil Vickery substitution had been made earlier? And, in the second Test, what if they had selected James Hook on the bench instead of Ronan O’Gara? It always seemed a strange decision at the time. O’Gara only covered one position, Hook covered the centres too.

I don’t know how many decisions McGeechan made on that tour. Hundreds, thousands. He probably got 95 per cent of them right. Maybe more. As I say, his instinct is brilliant.

And yes, yes, with hindsight, team selection is an easy game. Of course it is. But while those countless decisions he got right constitute an enormously impressive body of work, what if he had managed two more?

Maybe that’s called wanting too much of a good thing. But the fact is that the good thing wasn’t quite enough.