Stephen Jones wrote in the

You would need a detective to solve the mysterious case of the missing penalty kick. So it’s just as well there was one on the pitch. Ah, well, I did say beforehand that we shouldn’t blame the ref if he stuffs up tomorrow. Some hope of that. French polisher, French farce, call Romain Poite what you will, and many of you already have, the referee of the final test has been flambe´d on New Zealand social media.

Poite’s crime was to give the All Blacks a penalty to win the series and then to take it away again. And strangely Poite, a former police detective, got it both right and wrong.

Let’s deal with the incident because an awful lot of of offal has been written about it so far. I know the French love to nibble on the internal organs of ruminants, but there is no need to bury them under the stuff.

The first moment to consider was whether Kieran Read, assuming the All Blacks were all onside at the kick-off, played the jumper in the air. Warren Gatland certainly thought so and it is a tricky one.

Read took a running jump for the ball. The trouble was that he missed it. So when Liam Williams was catching the ball midair, he was also on the receiving end of Read’s considerable frame. There is no doubt that Williams dropped the ball because of the collision. And there is no doubt that at the moment of impact Read was no longer contesting possession, because he had already missed his attempted tap.

It’s a tricky one and in this instant you just have to go with the fact that the referee’s decision is final. The margin is so fine. If we are going to ref by slow motion and freeze frame then matches will take 10 hours to complete.

The next question is whether Ken Owens was offside, accidentally offside or euphemistically offside. Everyone assumed he was offside because the bloke gave himself up. Owens pleaded guilty of the crime down the station. He caught the ball, then dropped it, throwing his hands in the air in apology. But Owens is the nutter who confessed to the crime that he didn’t commit.

There was no accidental offside because Owens didn’t impede an opponent from playing the ball. Anton Lienert-Brown didn’t break stride in picking up the ball once Owens had released it and he was the nearest All Black.

But here’s the curious thing that seems to have got lost in the hysteria. Owens wasn’t offside at all. The ball went backwards. Freeze the frame at the moment it hits Williams, mark the point on the pitch, and then freeze the frame when Owens picks it up. The ball has travelled 3 or 4 metres backwards. It’s not even close.

The offside is an optical illusion caused by two things. Read’s impact on Williams sends him hurtling back down the pitch past where Owens collects the ball. And the Welsh hooker’s guilty reaction leads everyone to assume he is offside.

Poite’s huge mistake was not that he reviewed the incident once he had blown for a penalty. The Frenchman could see he had made a mistake and was pleading to the TMO for a way out. A scrum to New Zealand for accidental offside was the nearest to justice that they could get.

No, Poite’s mistake was not to play advantage. Lienert-Brown was hurtling towards the 22 and who knows what might have happened. A beautiful game was denied the possibility of a beautiful ending. Instead we got Gatland with a red clown nose. atland gets huge credit for wandering into the media conference after the match wearing a clown nose. He has had a few good moments with the media this tour and here was another one. Unlike lieutenant Rob Howley’s unbecoming rant about ‘‘disgraceful’’ media treatment the day before, Gatland took the high ground with a bit of self-deprecating humour. He was laughing at himself and he was laughing at us. Good on him.

But if the nose fits...Well no, on balance Gatland has come out of this tour in credit. He has made a couple of horrendous blunders which cost the Lions any chance of winning the first test. Let’s not forget those.

Gatland refused to start Johnny Sexton and Owen Farrell together in the build-up and picked Ben Te-o for the first test. It was odd. It could even look petty, as if he wanted to snub Eddie Jones, who plays Te’o on the bench and Farrell at 12. After one test Gatland was forced round to Jones’s way of thinking.

He also picked Peter O’Mahony as

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