Alastair Hignell: Lions should not go for blame game

Take all the what ifs, the might have beens and the if onlys and consign them to a dustbin marked history.

If the Lions are to win Saturday's Second Test in Pretoria – and level the three-match series – they have to ban all speculation about the one that got away.

This week's media has been full of theories, each of them trying to explain all the ebbs and flows of a quite extraordinary First Test in Durban.

South Africa won it, as we expected they would, and for the best part of an hour they played the sort of rugby that we had feared.

We expected them to be ring-rusty after weeks of competitive inaction, but they tore into the Lions from the whistle and in the process identified and exploited a totally unexpected point of weakness in the tourists.

But the Lions finished on top, surprisingly scored more tries than South Africa, and ended up regretting a handful of missed chances which could have won them the match.

It's a sad sign of our times that explanation is now followed swiftly by blame and the media has not been slow to name those whom they consider to be the guilty parties.

While World Cup-winning prop Phil Vickery was simultaneously identified as a weak link by the Sky commentators and fingered as a villain by New Zealand referee Bryce Lawrence, the Lions forwards preferred to take a collective responsibility and deny any illegality, and the Lions coaches reckoned the man with the whistle had got it wrong.

While they got it in the neck for not replacing Vickery earlier, the South African coaches attracted a whole shower of vitriol for making their replacements too soon.

Harlequins wing Ugo Monye – twice denied scoring chances by desperate South African defence, was judged guilty of neglecting to carry the ball under his outside arm rather than of making the honest mistakes of a rookie playing his First Test at this level.

And as for Mike Phillips who, apart from darting over for one brilliant try, had the ball knocked from his grasp when another was going begging – somebody had to be blamed.

But who? And to what purpose?

The old sporting truism, that you are only as good as your next game, has never been more applicable, nor the Sir Clive Woodward mantra, that after defeat a side should first draw lessons and then draw a line.

In his inimitable phrase, much used in the earlier days of an ultimately and staggeringly successful period in charge of England, "You cop it and then you move on."

Mind you, on the last Lions tour – to New Zealand in 2005 – the noble knight did not follow his own advice.

The Lions were humiliated by a Dan Carter-inspired All Blacks in the First Test in icy Christchurch but spent too much of the next week trying to make capital out of the first-minute spear-tackle that had dislocated tour captain Brian O'Driscoll's shoulder.

With Alastair Campbell at his side to sledge-hammer the message home, Sir Clive called a special midnight briefing in Christchurch after the match and from there on rarely let a press conference go by without attempting to get the All Blacks to take some blame.

Most of the run-up to the Second Test was overshadowed by the affair and even on the Thursday, at the last major briefing given by the Lions coaching panel, Eddie O'Sullivan was still looking backwards rather than forwards.

Selective amnesia has always been a virtue in top-class sport. Elite athletes have long used a visualisation technique in which they pore over videotapes of their greatest successes.

Sports psychologists are convinced that if their charges remind themselves of what they did at their moments of high triumph, and how it felt, they are more likely to recreate the process.

By the same token, they argue there is no point poring over and endlessly analysing the things that went wrong.

A negative, can't-do, mindset is anathema to a winning mentality.

And the Lions this weekend mustn't give house-room either to negativity or doubt.

They need to fix the things that can be fixed and ignore the things that can't.

They know, from the chances they created at King's Park, that they have the ability to damage the world champions. If they doubt that for an instant, the series is lost.