Alistair Hignell: Can the Lions survive?

The battle for hearts and minds may have been won, but not, it appears, the battle for brains.

The Lions concept has been saved. It has been saved not just off the field – with 50,000 fans ignoring the credit crunch to follow the tour – but on it – with the tourists coming within a whisker of winning each of the first two Tests before gloriously and emphatically triumphing in the third.

But now the thinking gets muddled.

Just as one swallow doesn't make a summer, so one victory doesn't make it any easier to squeeze a quart into a pint pot

The Lions – at least according to the British and Irish journalists commenting on the tour – need to be given more of an opportunity to flourish and thrive.

If that is the case the tour will have to be longer – the recently-concluded 10-match jaunt to South Africa was the shortest ever.

There will be a need for greater preparation time – the first match in South Africa came less than a week after the conclusion of the domestic season.

The team will have to face more meaningful opposition – not for the first time the host nation barred their Test players from appearing in provincial matches against the tourists.

And finally, there will have to be a more sympathetic fixture list – the South African rugby authorities were accused of making the Lions travel unnecessarily between fixtures.

The South Africans also gave their own players too much of an advantage by insisting on playing two of the three Tests at altitude.

But the pundits also recommend that future Lions tours should include four Test matches and that maybe the next expedition – to Australia in 2013 – should also include a warm-up match in Hong Kong or Tokyo – or both.

There's also a suggestion that the next Lions coach should revert to the much-derided Sir Clive Woodward model from New Zealand 2005 and take a huge squad of some 45 players, start the tour with a clear idea of his Test XV and play them together as often as possible.

Veteran Lions doctor James Robson has meanwhile said that the optimum tour would be eight weeks long with no more than one match a week, while there's a groundswell of opinion that suggests that this Lions tour was so successful precisely because coach Ian McGeechan stressed that everybody in the tour party had a chance of making the Test team and backed up his promises by giving each player plenty of opportunities to shine .

Without midweek fixtures that would have been impossible.

And without those games, and the insistence on the reversion to the idea of shared rooms, and shared squad responsibilities in terms of coaching clinics, hospital visits and other goodwill gestures, the Lions would not have been able to gel as a group in the very short time available to them.

That essential process could of course be extended at the front end by a rearrangement of the domestic season – in Lions tour years – to ensure that the squad was given a clear two weeks after the Heineken Cup Final and a full three weeks before their first tour fixture.

But the clubs' governing bodies could be excused for asking why they should diminish their own product at the end of one season to accommodate the Lions when they know it will be diminished at the start of the next by the lack of availability of the Lions stars – either through injury or through the need to have a regulatory eleven-week close season.

The host unions will similarly be asking why they should – either through fiddling with the fixture list, making the provincial teams more competitive or rejigging the itinerary – make it easier for the Lions to win a Test series against them.

And the national unions will be asking why they should interrupt their own attempts to develop a team capable of winning a World Cup when half-way between tournaments they have to yield control over their better players to a tour that for all its benefits will increase the risk of serious injury to those players.

The players themselves are as adamant as the fans and the pundits that Lions tours are extraordinary adventures.

To take part in one is an undoubted career highlight, a mark of one's development and standing.

But they too are aware of how brief a career can be and how the risk of burn-out is an ever-increasing one.

The competitiveness of the 2009 Lions has emphatically answered the question why there should be future tours.

It hasn't necessarily got closer to answering how.