- guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 15 2001 18.01 BST
It was a small moment among many big ones. Two minutes past the 80, the Lions, trailing by the margin of a converted try, win a penalty inside Australia's half and Matt Dawson looks to go for the quick tap. His captain Martin Johnson, all stern control, says no. Kick deep for the corner, the line-out and the pushover.
Dawson, as ever, does as he is told. For all his ego and creative instincts, for all his anger on this tour, for all his frustrations and all his heated, regretted words in his newspaper column, the scrum-half is a team man.
That the towering debutant Justin Harrison then stole the line-out ball from Johnson's leap to snuff out the Lions' late surge should not detract from the unity of purpose and effort the tourists displayed in the final moments of their final match together.
Still, defeat will sit in their souls for ever. And, once they leave the wonderland of their tour and touch down to share secrets back home, the questions will grow louder. There was dissent in the camp, of that there is no doubt. Only those who consume the party line will believe otherwise.
This has been the first real tour of open rugby - in the sense that it has been impossible to hide the rows, so transparent were the divisions and so constant the 'leaks'. Two players in particular were responsible, if that is the right word - Dawson and our own Observer columnist, Austin Healey. But they were not alone.
Healey has long had a reputation as a free spirit, on and off the pitch, and he followed his instincts in these pages and in those of our sister paper, The Guardian .
In yesterday's Guardian , he seriously lit the torch. A robust challenge to the locals, in his inimitable style, constituted a bravura exhibition of candour, designed to get under the skin of certain opponents - and, inadvertently perhaps, ruining the match-morning breakfast of his coach Graham Henry.
Henry, he of the cold stare and short quote, could barely contain his anger at Healey's razor words. Calling Harrison an ape probably didn't sit well, for one.
Well, Henry had better brace himself. There is a lot more to come.
Healey's agent, David Menasseh, said yesterday that there would be even tougher truths waiting in Healey's upcoming autobiography.
'He always says what he thinks,' Menasseh said. 'When we did these deals, I saw nothing in print restricting what he might say. He might have been warned not to say anything too silly, but there was nothing written down. There was a 60-day embargo on books, but there will be more in those, I'm sure.
'There is also this deal that ntl have done with the Lions, giving each of them a camera to film their experiences. I don't know what those might reveal.'
Since the mould-breaking Living With Lions on the considerably happier Lions tour of South Africa four years ago, the issue of access has become a problematic one for those who make money from such exercises. It would seem that, whatever control this tour management had over the players, the columns got away from them very early on.
Dawson, in fact, had kept a consistent line about his complaints almost from the first day. Perhaps they should have had a quiet word with him then, if only in the interests of team harmony and common purpose.
But rugby is sold now as TV-driven entertainment, and a wonderful show it has been, one of the most absorbing dramas in sport. The internal conflicts have provided much of the spark for the understandable prurience and Sky should not imagine that they could monopolise the soap opera simply because they'd paid for the broadcasting rights.
Clive Woodward, for instance, seems to have fallen heavily into this dark hole. Asked by The Guardian beforehand to give his views on yesterday's match, he responded curiously: 'I am working for Sky this series and I have made it a policy not to speak to the media about the Lions. All I will say is that the Lions will win.'
Picking up The Sun , then, it came as a mild surprise to see the England coach quoted at length - and commenting freely on the very issue of communication and the right of players to speak their minds.
On Dawson, for instance, Woodward had this to say: 'The things said in the press by the players was [sic] wrong, totally out of order. There is no defence for saying what they said. I will not allow that sort of thing to happen with England, which is why I refuse to write books, newspaper columns or allow fly-on-the-wall cameras.'
And yet there he is on television, expressing himself with all the freedom our ancestors fought for, and in print, for the same company's newspaper, under the by-line 'says Clive Woodward' - and he wants the players to accept the feudal notion that he alone is allowed to make judgments about their right to speak out.
It is hugely inconsistent, and it goes to the heart of modern sport and how we perceive those providing the entertainment. The time has long passed, surely, when athletes of any discipline should be expected to shut up and play, while those in charge of them can say what they like.
Certainly, it is reasonable to question the content of those columns. Nothing wrong with a difference of opinion. But it cannot be right to muzzle them - especially with the tour parcelled away on Sky, away from the gaze of those not hooked up to Rupert Murdoch's superb but expensive television service.
People want to know what's really going on - and Healey has provided it for them in The Observer . They do not want ladled guff, approved by a management obviously under severe pressure to shore up morale. The fault, if any, lies with Henry.
It is the coach's job to lay down proper lines of communication with his players in the first place, to make the players understand what is required of them. All the complaints by Dawson, Healey and several others now, have been on that single issue. Nobody knew what was going on. And that cannot be right.
The towering achievement of these Lions, then, has been that they overcame their differences.
Some will say the karma was bad. All tour, there had been poison seeping out from under the dressing-room floor. But, from 12,000 miles away through the prism of a television set, it did not look that way yesterday. They lost, but they tried to the extremities of their will. And that's all that matters, in the end.
