Hatfield Square was heaving last Saturday night. Essentially an open-air drinking emporium in the heart of Pretoria, this was the place to be after the test at Loftus Versfeld — as long you were under the age of 30 and had a serious thirst on you. And as long as you weren’t in any way related to Ronan O’Gara.

For Hatfield Square was where you could repeatedly hear one man’s name taken in vain in a variety of Welsh, Scottish, English and Leinster accents.

The general consensus was O’Gara could have saved himself all that ignominy if, with 79 minutes and 30 seconds on the clock and the scores tied, he’d had the good sense to boot the ball high into the stand. Was he concussed?

What seemed to have escaped most supporters — and was absent from most media analysis — was the point that in hoofing the ball skywards, O’Gara was trying to find a way of rescuing the victory the Lions had spent so much sweat, blood and broken bones trying to achieve. He wasn’t interested in a drawn series. He wanted the Lions to win. And so, even allowing for the clumsiness of his ‘challenge’ on Fourie du Preez, O’Gara’s final gesture was in its way emblematic of these tourists.

For the 2009 Lions will be remembered as brave Lions, certainly. Unlucky Lions also, when you consider the balance of the match officials’ decisions that went for and against them. And certainly not the last Lions, though this did seem possible 49 minutes into the first test, when the Springboks were all but out of sight and the Lions, watched by a less-then-full King’s Park, looked like a thoroughly bedraggled team and a wholly outdated sporting concept.

Even before yesterday’s heroics, this tour has proved the Lions are still a going rugby concern as well as a very obvious commercial winner. Even allowing for an unsympathetic preparation period and decidedly mixed opposition prior to the first test, they proved it’s still possible to be genuinely competitive, even with a relatively humdrum collection of talents.

The quality of the comeback in Durban, the sheer commitment in Pretoria and Johannesburg yesterday is due in no small part to the fact that this was one of the happiest, unified tour parties ever and for this, Paul O’Connell deserves as much credit as the tour management.

O’Connell may not always have cut the happiest figure and his press conferences may not have been laugh-a-minute affairs. There were times earlier in the tour when he might have been a more demonstrative or obvious leader.

But any suggestion that he lacked presence or charisma doesn’t tally with the testimony of team-mates such as Mike Phillips, who gave unqualified and unsolicited praise, or Nathan Hines, who spoke glowingly during the week about the skipper’s organisational qualities as the Lions’ de facto lineout coach.

While Ian McGeechan cited O’Connell’s physique as the defining factor in the original choice of captain, there is also the feeling that the large number of Welshmen in the party would have identified more readily with him than with Brian O’Driscoll, the only other credible candidate.

O’Driscoll was a talisman, enormously inspirational, yet it’s hard to imagine him being called from his room to console and control the tired and emotional Welsh player who lost control in the team hotel in the early hours after the Pretoria defeat.

Suggestions that O’Connell was under threat for his place were so wide of the mark to be laughable. The plank of that argument was that the Lions needed to dominate Victor Matfield out of touch but this was never going to happen. Of all the team systems that require the familiarity of repetition, the lineout is highest on the list.