Home defeats for New Zealand do not happen often, so inevitably the inquest began in earnest not long after Owen Farrell had kept the series alive with his trusty right boot. And unsurprisingly, Sonny Bill Williams is the villain of the piece as far as the New Zealand press is concerned.

His red card after 25 minutes was the key moment in Wellington, but there are few complaints that the centre deserved to be sent off for his shoulder charge on Anthony Watson’s head. So, New Zealand’s best known and most polarising sportsman is copping the flak. “Suddenly Bloody Walking,” Mark Geenty wrote for stuff.co.nz. “What was he thinking? In one of the biggest Tests of his and his team-mates’ careers?”

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A common theme of the criticism is that Williams’s shoulder charge was as a result of his rugby league background. “Years of code hopping, boxing, boxing clever by SBW has produced one of the most remarkable careers in New Zealand sport,” Chris Rattue wrote in the New Zealand Herald. “But it also produced the ill‑disciplined tackle, one which could have caused immense damage to Lions wing Anthony Watson.”

Rattue added: “SBW doesn’t have rugby instincts, not genuine ones. They are not imbued. He’s moved around too much. His no-arms, shoulder-to-head tackle on Watson was stupid, and scarcely believable from a top professional, quite frankly. It came from a place he couldn’t leave behind. It left his coaches and team‑mates scrambling.”

Some even wonder whether it has cost Williams his place in the All Blacks side for good. “It’d be a sad outcome if he doesn’t kick on to the World Cup in Japan in 2019, and his All Black legacy is being the first All Black in the professional era to be red‑carded,” Phil Gifford wrote for stuff.co.nz.

While Williams’s sending-off was the most talked-about incident, it was not the only one. The British & Irish Lions shipped 13 penalties during the match and Mako Vunipola was responsible for four of those. Among them was a charge on Beauden Barrett at a ruck. “The late, no arms, shoulder charge screamed for a yellow card, and it would have been hard to argue that his dive into an unprotected Barrett on the ground didn’t raise the level very close to red,” Gifford wrote.

There are few complaints with the outcome of the match, however, and the Lions levelling the series. Rattue wrote “the Wellington result is a magnificent day for a sport which can only take so much All Black dominance before it gets tiring”.

Gregor Paul, also writing for the New Zealand Herald, added: “World Rugby has what it craves. It has the winner takes all, monumental series decider between the world’s No1 side and a credible, authentic, genuine challenger that represents four key pillars of the northern hemisphere game. The sport needed this after the All Blacks romped through last year and set excitable tongues wagging that the one‑sidedness of it all was a giant turn off and sending diehard supporters to shopping malls, Pilates classes, juice bars and Lego exhibitions, anything really, in search of greater fulfilment.”

There is also a sense that the Lions resoundingly answered questions over their existence and future tours to New Zealand with a first win against the All Blacks since 1993, while Mark Reason wrote for stuff.co.nz that the swaths of Lions supporters played a key role in their comeback. “It wasn’t 14 men against 15 on Saturday night. It was 14 against 16. Those sort of numerical odds were too much for even the All Blacks to overcome. I know some New Zealanders who were supporting the Lions in Wellington on Saturday just to be a part of the fan fun.”