The blame game began as soon as the game finished

As a nation, we are not the best of losers. One manifestation of this is our tendency to blame disappointments on referees.

The All Blacks drew their final test with British and Irish Lions on Saturday and, with it, the series.

As you will expect, the people of the British Isles are ecstatic about this. New Zealanders, of course, are appropriately gloomy about our team’s failure to win the series.

As a nation, we are not the best of losers. One manifestation of this is our tendency to blame disappointments on referees. Saturday night was no exception.

Referee Romain Poite, of France, made some questionable calls during the game. Particularly bad was the decision not to award a penalty to the All Blacks for offside play at the death of the game. The consensus is that this was a mistake. Since the infringement occurred within kicking range, the charge is that Poite cost us the series.

This assumes that first-five Beauden Barrett would have kicked the goal. Of course, there is no certainty of this. For all his undeniable brilliance, Barrett is not the most reliable kicker in All Blacks history. In fact, he had already missed half his shots at goal to that point.

But more to the point, rugby is an 80-minute game. The 78th minute is no more crucial than the 15th. The timing of Poite’s error was dramatic, but the game ought to have been won by that point.

The referee didn’t give the All Blacks butterfingers.

He did not force them to squander a noticeable territory advantage.

And as long as we have human referees, then there will be an element of human error in how the game is refereed. It is just part of the game. Blaming a loss – or a draw – on refereeing mistakes is like finding fault with the weather. It is boring and lame.

As with sports, so with politics and elections. One sure sign of a losing campaign is the tendency to blame the media when things aren’t going well.

Remember the second debate of the 2012 American presidential election? Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of being slow to acknowledge that terrorism was behind the Benghazi attack and debate moderator Candy Crowley stepped in. Apparently deciding to be a participant in the debate rather than a mere facilitator, she rebuked Romney for getting the story wrong.

But it was Crowley who was wrong. Mitt Romney was right on the material facts, as she later admitted. The wrongheaded – and boneheaded – decision to intervene probably cost Mitt Romney the second debate.

But did this cost him the election? No. Poor debate moderation was something that was outside Romney’s control. Within his control, however, was how he planned and executed his own election strategy.

At a time of increasing anxiety about job security, Romney ran a campaign that exalted the creative destruction of capitalism. He went on and on about the importance of entrepreneurs. Given that most voters are not entrepreneurs and just want a job, this turned out to be an unwise strategy.

Four years earlier, a Republican opponent said that Romney reminded you of ‘‘the guy who laid you off’’. That was a much bigger factor in his defeat than Crowley’s intervention.

Then there was his campaign’s get-out-the-vote- effort. If Romney’s bland corporate image was a weakness, his bland corporate competence was going to make up for it.

An important element of his organisational effort was ORCA – a turnout system that was going to give him an ‘‘unprecedented’’ edge at the polls.

ORCA was a disaster. Romney volunteer and commentator John Ekdahl wrote a great account of the botching. You can find it on the Ace of Spades HQ blog – look it up. Needless to say, this wasn’t Candy Crowley’s fault either.

Here’s a hint for the general election this year: The side with the poorest campaign will blame the media the most.

You can count on the media making mistakes from time to time, of course. You can also expect those mistakes to cut against conservatives and the radical-left more than they will against gentry liberals. That just reflects human nature and the fact that those who work in the news tend towards a certain bourgeois liberalism in their world view.

But this is a known phenomenon. It may be outside the control of campaigners, but it is something to be expected. Not knowing precisely where the hurricane will make landfall is no excuse for not being at the ready.

Parties with proper systems, good advisers and quality candidates leave as little to chance as possible. They don’t count on fair treatment. And they certainly don’t compound media troubles with serious unforced errors of their own.

Test series aren’t won or lost in the final minutes of the last game. The same goes for elections. Counting on error-free refereeing is as foolhardy as expecting the ball to bounce the right way.