AFTER today, the 2013 British & Irish Lions will be history.

If things go their way in Sydney's ANZ Stadium they will be able to look forward to some ministerial receptions, a glut of gongs in the New Year honours list and a lifetime of dining out on their stories and anecdotes of the tour. Lose, and they will slink back into the shadows, their chance of immortality gone.

For the Lions players, there is a glorious quality of self-containment about today's third Test against Australia. Afterwards, there will be no talk about what the result means for the Six Nations or the World Cup or anything else. There will only be dispersal, back to their clubs and countries, either as legends of the game or as a bunch of blokes who tried their best, and failed.

Let's not forget that failure has been the norm for the Lions in their 125 years as a touring side. In all that time, they have won just eight series and three of those were prior to 1900, when our colonial cousins were only getting their acts together as sporting nations. There was not a single series win between 1899 and 1971, a record that ought to be recalled far more often than it is.

Nor have many of those failures been of a particularly heroic kind. The 2-1 loss to South Africa in 2009 probably qualifies, as the Lions had rotten luck and even more rotten refereeing in a second Test in which they deserved to square the series. Mostly, they have simply been beaten by better sides.

Their historic disadvantages – lack of preparation time, unfamiliarity with each other, hostile touring environments – have only been exacerbated in the professional era.

On paper, the 2013 tour should have been a cakewalk for the Lions. Australia, traditionally the least fearsome of the southern hemisphere's big three, looked to be there for the taking, at the bottom of their four-year World Cup cycle and missing a clutch of big-name players. There was a workmanlike look to the Wallabies at the start of the tour, and it would be pushing it to say they have done much to change that impression.

Yet, the hosts go into today's game as clear favourites. Having lost the first Test in Brisbane 23-21 they gathered momentum in Melbourne a week ago when they squeezed out a 16-15 win. The margins have been achingly slim and both Tests have been surrendered by missed kicks at the death. But the psychological advantage unquestionably rests with Australia. To be frank, Warren Gatland, the Lions coach, did nothing to dent it when he named his team the other day.

Gatland's decision to drop Brian O'Driscoll has attracted most attention but is probably the least significant component of his overall approach. Of far more concern has been his faith in a crop of Welsh players whose capture of this year's Six Nations title owed much to the enfeeblement of the opposition they faced. Wales found themselves beautifully against England on the final weekend but they had played in fits and starts up to that point.

Gatland has argued that he is blind to issues of nationality in the Lions context. Presumably, he is also blind to the fact Glasgow's scrum destroyed the Ospreys in a PRO12 game at Scotstoun two months ago, for he subsequently failed to pick a single Glasgow forward in his original tour squad while handing out invitations to five of the Ospreys pack. It was a staggering and indefensible oversight that could yet blow up in his face in Sydney today.

Clive Woodward made the same mistake in 2005. His England team had crawled over the finishing line to win the World Cup two years earlier but Woodward dragged a clutch of them out of retirement and off their sick beds and told them to do the same for the Lions. Unsurprisingly, they were humiliated, sung to their sporting graves by the excruciating dirge of The Power of Four, personally commissioned by Woodward and remembered only as the most ironically titled anthem ever sung.

History may be more kind to Gatland. He already has one more Lions Test win to his name than Woodward managed, but he also enjoys the considerable advantage of putting his side out against a team that is not remotely the equal of the All Blacks of eight years ago. If his Lions do scrape home today, he will no doubt be hailed as a genius in Wales, but only by those who choose not to acknowledge the shortcomings of the opposition.

Regardless of the result today, Gatland has already failed. The job of a coach – any coach – is to get the best from the players he has at his disposal, and nobody believes for a moment that he has come close to doing that over the past six weeks.

At the finish, he has simply reverted to the players he knows best. To all intents and purposes, he has found out nothing about the others.

The best Lions sides have been greater than the sum of their parts. They have been teams in which dark horses came through, as they did so brilliantly under Ian McGeechan in South Africa in 1997, but Gatland has brought no-one to the fore. He might have a series win on his cv by the end of today, but he will not have triumphed in the role.