In beating the Maori with considerable ease, the Lions took rugby back a few decades in Rotorua but themselves forward a number of significant steps.

They will feel ready for the All Blacks now having established all the keep parts of their game in are good order. They crushed the life out of the Maori. It was like watching someone sit on a balloon, the pressure built and built towards the inevitable pop.

There was no finesse or mystique about it - the Lions rolled up their sleeves in the style of an officious matron dealing with her ward and clinically went about their business.

Functional, direct, confrontational and focused. They were all of those things and while it was a victory for the Lions it maybe not so much a win for rugby. Romantics everywhere would be sobbing into their soup at the relentless grinding nature of it all, but this is how the Lions want to be: this is how they think they can beat the All Blacks. Maybe they will, but they have signalled loud and clear what they will be bringing and they have to hope that their one trick is going to be good enough.

If the Lions have something up their sleeve for the tests, there's a fair chance it won't be anything too thrilling.

Imaginative rugby isn't their bag. Creativity as New Zealanders understand it isn't in their thinking. Isn't in their system. It's just not in any part of their picture.

There was, once again, no desire from the Lions to open the game up with ball in hand. They didn't want to push things wide - partly because they were not so comfortable out there and partly because that was exactly where the Maori wanted them to go.

So instead, with all the surprise factor of a Russian election, the big runners came off the ruck and hit it up. It was bump, recycle, bump recycle.

Lineout ball was mostly driven. Taken well, hidden in the throng and then walked up the field. It got them going forward but in a sort of World War I sort of way - hard fought inches at a time with the potential for casualties always there.

It was trench warfare. None of it unexpected and of course Conor Murray, Johnny Sexton and Leigh Halfpenny pitched in with their aerial bombardment.