His silence had been deafening in the days after the first Test, but Tana Umaga faced the music and the press yesterday. It clearly didn't have him jumping out of his bed shouting "yippee", and he was discernibly uncomfortable, but he was well able to handle it and he wasn't too contrite either.

Facing fire from all sides (even unusually, in their own country, as evidenced by an editorial in the New Zealand Morning Herald the day before) you sensed the All Blacks and their skipper have been backed into a corner. Their sense of discomfiture is probably compounded by a feeling that they have been pushed there with a little help from Alastair Campbell and Clive Woodward.

The Wednesday lunchtime media hour with the players, held in the swanky New Zealand rugby docklands headquarters adjacent to the Westpac Stadium, would not normally see journalists moving around from player to player in huddles, but the All Blacks probably reasoned that this would have led to a farcical posse descending on Umaga and initially ignoring everyone else.

So Umaga sat awkwardly but unyielding at the top table on his own. Standing to one side was Anton Oliver, while the remainder of his team-mates congregated in the corner, looking utterly unperturbed, though tellingly one could be heard saying to the others "we should stand behind him."

And so, as the cameras whizzed, he took a deep breath.

"Obviously I'm looking forward to this week and I must say I'm really excited about seeing you guys," he quipped. "As I said after the game, it was a disappointing thing that happened to Brian O'Driscoll. Another blow to the Lions with the loss of Lawrence Dalaglio and Richard Hill. I must say the way I play, I play hard but in all my games I try and play as fair as I can, and that's just the way I am. It was an unfortunate incident and these things happen."

Asked why he made no attempt to see how his opposing captain and outside centre was, Umaga remained a proud All Black in front of his team-mates.

"I felt a more important role to my team at that stage. I was trying to keep them together, in such a lengthy period, we had to sort some things out that were better for us. First and foremost my allegiance is to the All Blacks and that's the way it is."

Umaga said he had asked Lions' players about O'Driscoll's well-being after the first Test. "But I don't try and do things through the media. We'll try and make contact, and when we do, we will. That's just the way I am."

According to O'Driscoll, he had left a message on O'Driscoll's mobile on Sunday, but there has been no direct contact after O'Driscoll did likewise on Monday.

He described the response to the haka by the Lions and their captain as different. "We hadn't come across that before. Each team has their own way of approaching the haka, but in reality the haka is for us. It's about what it means to the All Blacks and we do it for ourselves, to make sure we're in the right frame of mind for a Test."

Asked if anything the Lions or O'Driscoll had done in response to the Haka had annoyed him, he said: "No, not at all. It just caught us on the hop. It was different."

That the episode and it's front-page fall-out had deflected attention from his team's performance had annoyed him. "But what can you do? I can't tell you what to do." Asked if it was a complete accident, he said: "Yes. Yes."

Rugby's citing procedures had obliged him to stay quiet at the post-match press conference.

"It obviously was dealt with by the people meant to deal with it and I thought that was the end of it, other than maybe having a word with Brian himself, person to person. That's how I do things. I haven't had that opportunity as yet, but who knows it might happen."

That the Herald editorial said the saga had bestowed little credit on New Zealand rugby hurt him the most. "We try and raise standards. I understand we are role models for a lot of people in this country, through the standing that we have here, and when that is hit I think that's the most disappointing thing for me."

He was at his most uncomfortable when asked to explain how O'Driscoll ended up in the air, upside down, and hurtling toward the ground. "I think it's too late for explanations now. Everyone's got their own . . . it's Wednesday. We' ve got two more days to try and prepare for a game. I could explain it, but I just think everyone has already made their decisions," he said, puzzlingly, before the All Blacks' press officer called a halt.

Over to one table in a corner, Keven Mealamu had a little inappropriately been joking with Tony Woodcock, while Umaga was speaking, but when questioned, the hooker seemed a little more contrite.

"It was unfortunate but that's rugby. It's a physical game. You wish it hadn't happened but it did. It was a ruck and I just wanted to blow him out of the way," he said. "I hope Brian is going to be alright, but that was last week now, and we've just got to put that behind us because we've just as big a challenge this week. If we spend too long thinking about last week we're definitely going to be caught out this week. I don't really want to talk about it."

However, when pressed, Mealamu admitted: "I would speak to Brian if I got the opportunity but I'd rather do it personally than on the phone. I might get to speak to him after the game on Saturday."

Asked about O'Driscoll's description of the double spear as a lethal challenge, beyond the laws of the game, Mealamu responded: "It's disappointing what he said. Me and Tana, we're not that sort of people. I play hard, but I never play dirty. I've got kids and I want to be a good role model."

On Umaga taking the heat while he lurked in the shadows, Mealamu smiled. "He's giving me a lot of stick behind the scenes. I didn't even realise Tana was on the other side (of the ruck). I just wanted to clean him (O'Driscoll) out." Then another press officer interjected and pulled him away.