Paul O'Connell is always a good man to obtain an assessment from at the end of a campaign. He calls it as honestly as he played it. With Ireland's next Test at home to the All Blacks in November and two more encounters with them here next summer, it seemed pertinent to ask what the lessons were from this tour from an Irish standpoint.

"I was talking with Rog (Ronan O'Gara) about this. I think Irish forwards need to be fitter, I think we need to improve our ball skills, like myself more than anyone. I've never spilled as much ball as I have in the last two games. When you look at (Keven) Mealamu throwing skip passes last week, Jerry Collins throwing passes, offloading all the time rather than taking one-up runners. I think our forwards need to be fitter and we need to be able to produce skills under pressure."

And the footwork?

"When New Zealanders grow up it's all about the one-on-one, being able to beat a guy one-on-one and get your hands free. I think maybe we, with schools and stuff, are a small bit structured. You take it up, you come around the corner and this kind of thing. Yeah, their footwork, their general skills in the pack, is very good."

O'Connell is an ultra-competitive winner by nature, which must have made being involved in four successive defeats hard to take.

"It's just been a killer. When you win a game, you don't mind going out for a few beers, you feel good about it. But when you lose you just want to get home and look at the video and see what you did wrong. The last four or five weeks have been tough that way. You're just beating yourself up all week. It makes it a very tough time when you're away from home."

As for lessons learned, O'Connell makes a valid point about it being harder to have winning Lions tours in the professional era.

"Six weeks to put together a team to take on the best team in the world was a lot easier 12 years ago when the game wasn't as structured as it is now. Everything - defence, attack, lineouts, scrum - is so structured now that it's very hard to put it together in six weeks.

"You nearly need your bad days to learn and move on and be a better team. Unfortunately here when you have a bad day, more often than not it's in the first Test."

Not that he has any answers. "The clubs, provinces and internationals are going to be demanding more and more time. I don't know - it's a tough one. I honestly don't have the answers. It's a very tough one."

By contrast, the sense of satisfaction was acute with the All Blacks, and no one more so than Justin Marshall. Beating the Lions had been a magnet for players like him since the last World Cup.

"Particularly I wanted to be involved for the players who had gone before me, like the (Andrew) Mehrtenses, Taine Randells, Jonah Lomus, Christian Cullens - fantastic, great All Blacks. They are legends of our game and they just haven't, for one reason or another, been able to get to this point. To be able to sit down and have a beer with them at some stage and describe what it was like, that means a lot to me.

"More than feeling sad and emotional I feel satisfied really. I don't feel unhappy; I feel happy, because I think the way we've won and finished off the series was a good thing. So yeah, I'm not sad. I'm really completely satisfied with the way it's finished."

Not that he's ruled himself out of the All Blacks for ever. He has notified Graham Henry his contract with Leeds expires in May 2007, prior to the autumn World Cup in France. "It would be silly to shut that door if the opportunity arises just to communicate, and that's what we're going to do."

Marshall spoke emotionally about how rugby has made him a better man.

"It's just been a life-changing experience for me, like growing up where I did.

"For me it's taken my life in a different direction from the one I could have gone down. Rugby in New Zealand is a passionate sport but to be involved in - to be somebody who has had to learn how to grow up - I was involved in a tour and went home, and a couple of incidents in my career - but you really learn from those things. It's made me a better person and I really value the fact that the game has given me that, and it's taken me to places and given me experiences that I would never, ever have dreamed of."

He envied Byron Kelleher starting the last two Tests, and he's no doubt he leaves the All Blacks on the cusp of a golden era, as when he first broke into the team in 1997 in the win over France in Paris.

"Deep down in my gut that makes me really pleased that I've made the right decision to move on because I feel that this team is really going to grow and they don't need somebody like me around to help that."

Amid the understandable Kiwi love-in with a legend, it seemed almost impertinent to ask for his take on the series win, but his answer was revealing.

"I think we as a team really targeted what we thought that the Lions were going to come here and target on us, which was setpiece. I think we dominated them at setpiece throughout this series and because of that it took away a very major attacking weapon from them and I didn't think that they had a plan B. It really seemed to take away their physicality and they didn't really have another game plan to fall back on."