The long season is taking its toll

I have never witnessed such dramatically different halves of rugby in one match. It was almost like the two teams agreed before the match to take turns with the ball. I can just about imagine John Eales and Martin Johnson talking before the match, "you have the ball in the first half, and we'll have it in the second".

At half-time the Wallabies were not in the game. The Lions were dictating every aspect as they had done for most of the match a week earlier in Brisbane. The only positive that Australia could take out of the first half was that they were only five points adrift. The Wallabies needed to be gifted something from the Lions.

It came in the first minute of the second half. Jonny Wilkinson spotted a three on two overlap down the short right-hand side. The decision to run the ball was correct, the execution wasn't. Instead of using the next man, Wilkinson tried to cut him out to give the next man the run. Joe Roff, spotting the danger stepped in from his wing and took the ball, sprinted to the corner to score and bring Australia back into the contest.

Many have said that this pass changed the whole Test match. Without doubt this is true, but for me the defining moment in the game came a short time after. The Lions had a scrum in Australian territory. In Brisbane they had scored from a very similar position by bringing O'Driscoll and Robinson to run together down the right. It worked a charm as James scored in the corner.

As the scrum went down in Melbourne, I could see the same three Lions looming into position on the right of the scrummage.

The Wallaby scrum, which has always been marked down as a potential weakness, picked this moment to change the direction of events. They screwed the Lions scrum and then powered over the top of it. The Lions forwards were all over the place, Eales swooped on the ball, Smith cleaned out, then Gregan and Larkam combined to put Roff on a 40-metre sprint into the same corner.