Defeat. My initial reaction on Saturday, as ever, was to be devastated. I never want that to change and it never will. When I was at the start of my England career, in 2001 and the years before, I found defeat very, very hard to take. Defeat stirred such strong feelings that I sometimes found I didn’t want to leave the changing room after the game; I didn’t want to have to go outside and deal with it.

I would invariably sit in the corner of the changing room with my head down. Unbeknown to me at the time, I was behaving pretty selfishly. I would have been thinking about myself: what more could I have done? Where did I go wrong? I would tell myself that these thoughts were with the whole team in mind, yet still I made myself the focus and in that respect I was selfish and immature.

But I guess I was at least on the right track. My attitude to defeat wasn’t right but it wasn’t completely wrong.

My biggest lesson in defeat was that famous 76-0 in Brisbane in 1998. My initial response to that was “what a terrible disaster”, but I realised, thanks to some wise guidance, that I needed to turn it round and ask myself: what am I going to do about it? Do I submit to that defeat? Or do I use that defeat to change the rest of my life?

A fair amount of time has trickled by since then, and although I still feel the same burning disappointment after being beaten, I also feel — strange to say — a kind of excitement. It is an eagerness to get straight back to work and to put it all right.

I mention all this — my learning curve, if you like — because on Saturday after the defeat by Australia when I was looking around the changing room at my team-mates, I saw that they — the younger ones in particular — had fast-forwarded through that learning curve that I went through and had kind of caught me up. In the demeanour of Shane Geraghty, Ugo Monye and Danny Care, you could see the intense disappointment but I listened to them for a bit and it was all: “What if we did this differently? What if we tried that?”

There was no “poor me”, no concern about what the newspapers were going to write, no knee-jerk reaction; it wasn’t heated and there was no sulking. Instead, they took it on the chin and after a while, it was instead a case of little informal groups talking to each other: “Do you think this or that would work? Well done for this — could we take it further?”

That was where my mind was, too. In the changing room, Brian Smith, the attack coach, asked me how I felt about the game and my response was this stream of thoughts and reactions: “What if we do this? What if we try that?”

As the No 10, the directional tool in the team, finding the answers to how to beat the opposition is what I am there for. I was trying to find those answers and that is where my biggest lessons will come. My lesson is: how can I affect the process better, how can I get more from the guys?

My job was to direct us to a win and that didn’t quite happen. That is why my answer to Brian was this surge of thoughts and ideas as to what we could and should do next.

Brian pretty much told me to not get carried away, to not let these thoughts fester — which is generally best — and to save it all for when the team are back in camp. But that is the test of how good this team can become: how much we learn from these thoughts and ideas, how much farther we can take them on.

For starters, there is a fair amount of technical work to be done. Fair play to Australia, they generated quick ball and they have some good strike runners and these ensured they were very effective going forward.

The test now is for our side to show we are learning. We might have to take a few hits on the chin, but success is all about how you dust yourself down thereafter.