David Campese knows things could be a lot worse for Ronan O'Gara. Like O'Gara, Campo was one of the world's most venerated players of his generation. Like O'Gara, Campo was prone to the odd brain-fart.

And, like O'Gara, he knows what it's like to have the loss of a Lions series debited against all your achievements.

But it was a lot worse for Campo -- publicly at least.

His moment of madness in the 1989 final Lions Test, when a wild pass led to Ieuan Evans' match-winning score, resulted in him being shunned by his team-mates, while former players queued up to call for him to be permanently removed from the side.

Nick Farr-Jones, the Australian captain, subsequently had to write to a national newspaper in order to exonerate his colleague and plead for mercy.

No such opprobrium for O'Gara, yet the pain probably runs deeper than it ever did for Campo.

Only this time O'Gara's public humiliation has been diluted by the eye-gouging controversy (albeit one wonders whether South Africa's ambiguity is any less morally repugnant than Irish rugby's closing of ranks when Alan Quinlan was in the dock).

Still, it was rather amusing to hear the self-serving Jeremy Guscott don the executioner's cap during the week as he admonished O'Gara's hapless late cameo and called for him to "hang his head in shame".

He hardly needed such prompting. After all, this is the man who apologised to all his team-mates after the Croke Park win over England this year when his strength -- goal-kicking -- became his weakness.

He missed two from six shots at goal that day. But his team-mates told him to shut up. "I was low and you must feel the pain," he recalls in his recently updated autobiography. Hence the superfluity of Guscott's call.

Anyway, his captain revealed later in the week what we already assumed about O'Gara's bottomless pit of doom.

"He was disappointed and very low but he is a tough guy and he is mentally very tough and that is his biggest strength," confirmed Paul O'Connell. "What happened won't be lost on him, no doubt about it."

The procession of sycophantic sympathisers wheeled out in the media this week have all recited the player's list of achievements by rote, as if that somehow exonerates him from being pilloried for his efforts in the dramatic final minutes of one of rugby's greatest ever Tests.

Yet that is missing the point entirely. For it is precisely because O'Gara has compiled so many honours in his career that there is such extreme disappointment. That's reality -- not mealy-mouthed sentimentality.

His manager on the 2001 Lions tour and his former Ireland manager, Donal Lenihan, shares club ties with O'Gara but the venerable former second-row has never stooped to the obsequious levels inhabited by many in Irish rugby.

"The concession of that opportunity from a reckless mid-air collision by Ronan O'Gara will haunt him for the rest of his career," was Lenihan's mercifully simple and calculated assessment. He went on. "O'Gara, in particular, had a very rough seven minutes, shifting a massive hit from Pierre Spies and, for some unknown reason, electing to kick long rather than to touch in the final minute, leading to the concession of the winning penalty."

For former Scottish international Gavin Hastings, personal scars of a simple missed kick that could have sent the Scots into the 1991 World Cup final came thundering back to mind.

"To the forefront of my thoughts when I watched Ronan O'Gara kick that high ball out of defence, chase it and give away the crucial penalty that cost us a draw was my missed kick against England in that semi-final.

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"Sadly for O'Gara, that decision will haunt him for the rest of his life, in the same way that that missed kick of mine in 1991 is something I will take to my grave," said Hastings.

Some have posited that O'Gara was simply adopting the Lions credo of giving everything for the win -- yet a drawn game would still have given the Lions a chance to tie the series.

Given the bonuses on offer, his folly probably cost his team over £250,000.

Sport reveals weakness and O'Gara's Achilles heel -- his tackling -- also ultimately surfaced in all its gruesome detail last weekend. His dropping from today's 22 is the clearest indication the Lions management feel the same.

Ironically, it has always been thus with O'Gara. And yet had one raised the topic before the game, the issue would have been ridiculed by many of the apologists wheeled out to sympathise with him this week.

But tackling has always been a weakness for a player whose physical development was tardier than most. Yet his outrageous talent with the boot and his finely-honed passing game have, more often than not, concealed the fact that when it comes to tackling, O'Gara deploys what an old Terenure College coach called the 'bus stop' technique -- stick out your hand and hope something stops.

As his former coach Eddie O'Sullivan observed once, O'Gara is not the type of player who can simply pile on 30 pounds. John Hayes once slagged him by calling him a 'skinny, fat b*****d'; he hasn't the body type to withstand the car-crash hits in modern rugby.

However, O'Gara can tackle; a textbook early hit on Lawrence Dallaglio at Twickenham was a seminal moment and paved the way for Ireland's breakthrough Triple Crown in 2004. Yet he has admitted to always resenting the fact that there was so much emphasis on power and weights when he was growing up, and while he was progressing in the professional game.

He self-depreciatingly calls himself 'The Machine' in the gym. And yet while nobody expected him to tackle like Ollie Campbell, one wonders whether his brilliance in other areas, allowing him to rule virtually unchallenged as out-half at Munster and Ireland for nigh on a decade, has somehow led to a neglect of the one glaring flaw in his game.

"The coaches tell me, and I know myself, that it is the one area of my game that requires a little bit of improvement. It all comes down to technique and timing." O'Gara said this three years ago. Seemingly, little has changed.

He's 32 now and his pre-eminence will be challenged next season at club and international level like never before. His singular mental strength will allow for redemption. Against South Africa this autumn, perhaps.

"I thought that was just so unprofessional from a professional player," said former Springbok out-half Naas Botha on Friday.

It brings to mind O'Connell's reply from the last Lions tour when he responded to O'Gara's jibes about his handling. "You're leading the stats for tackles on Casper the Ghost."

Sadly for O'Gara, this is one horror story he'll never be allowed to forget.