Maybe the problem for England rugby is that they get too many second-raters. The cream of the country goes to football and rugby makes do with what is left.

I’ve got some statistics fresh from the oven here which suggest that rugby is doing a good job – and it is - but there is an inevitability about the magnetism of football and it’s nothing to do with glamour, pay-packets or Baby Bentleys. The stats show that of the 1200 biggest rugby clubs in England the number of kids playing mini-rugby has swollen from 57,036 in July 2003 to 101,655 in July 2008. That constitutes a rise of 78 per cent in five years. Yes, impressive.

But look at it another way. If you are a parent and you have a young boy who likes to run around, who you think would enjoy sport and would like to get started early, he can be playing mini-football almost anywhere in the country from the age of three. If he is enjoying it and is half-decent, then by the time he is five, he will probably be being trained and prepared to start playing seven-a-side matches for his local club. Competition generally starts at under-seven though there is no legislation on minimum age. In other words, a good five-year-old might well get a game.

The chances are quite high, therefore, that he is already beyond the clutches of rugby. Due to legislation and insurance issues, rugby clubs cannot play a boy in any kind of a game until they are six though some allow five-year-olds to train.

In other words, football opens its doors two years earlier. And when rugby becomes a possibility, football is already picking its teams. That makes the battle for talent mighty hard for rugby to win.

Yes, there are cultural differences and many are the parents who would rather their boys were rugby players than football players. But given no bias, football wins.

That is not a slur on rugby. Not remotely. Technically, it is a very complicated game, there seems little point in trying to teach a three-year-old how to slip an inside pass or launch a Garryowen; and invariably when I see minis playing rugby I am impressed with the organisation and understanding and the fact that so many kids who cannot yet tie their own shoelaces actually get this most bizarre of rules that you are only allowed to pass backwards. But the fact remains: football gets first pick.

It is also a fact that the England team is not short on football rejects. Paul Sackey had a trial with Crystal Palace, Danny Care spent a couple of years on the books of Sheffield Wednesday until he stopped being selected. It makes you wonder what kind of rugby players the England footballers might have made: John Terry as No 8, Joe Cole at scrum half, Rio Ferdinand as your lineout specialist and Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard: fly halves or flankers?

In conclusion: this is not a problem to be addressed. It is no one’s fault. It is just plain fact. Football gets first dibs.

The debate

I wonder today what it must be like to be Danny Care, what it must be like to be the villain of the piece, to have the most reasonable of rugby correspondents, our very own man in The Times, calling for you to be hung, drawn and quartered.

Care will, for a day or two, or maybe even until someone else gets a yellow card which is surely not far away, be relegated to what in certain parts comes to be known as “Public Enemy No1” – and there is competition aplenty for that midst the England team these days. And it also seems quite likely that, until England blow another couple of Test matches and Twickenham opts for what is fast becoming a seasonal change of management, he will be cast out to The Stoop and left merely to clean up the empties, sweep the stands and score the occasional sensational try.