In football, you live with the ever-present possibility of nicking a result. Perhaps that’s the game’s chief charm: that even when you face a team better in every way, there is always the chance of getting away with something. As a result, the game is obsessed by the idea of justice: Chelsea are a goal up and just about deserve it; lucky Arsenal got away with murder in a victory they never deserved, etc, etc.

In rugby, the concept scarcely exists. That’s because in rugby, you almost always get what you deserve. Perhaps that’s the game’s chief charm. And though it was true that when England played New Zealand on Saturday, there were long moments when it seemed that the home team might get away with a not-too-heavy defeat, times, even, when it seemed that England might nick a try and hold out for an unlikely win, the truth of the matter is that England were always going to get precisely what they deserved.

We see it time and again in rugby matches: the minnows can hold out for the first half, and even for 20 minutes of the second half — but then the house falls down. Strength, speed, superior technique, better planning, deeper experience, greater resolve and higher expectation take their inevitable toll. Thus it was that England, a mere 12-6 down as the hour approached, painfully, deservedly, conceded another 20 unanswered points before the game was done.

You don’t get away with anything in rugby. In the sport — particularly at the highest level of the game — you are doomed to finish the 80 minutes standing before the world exactly as you are. On Saturday, England showed that they are as far off the pace of elite international rugby as they are from Alpha Centauri. They were shown in this light by an All Blacks side slipping below their best after a long and brilliant tour, in which the kicker, Dan Carter, for once couldn’t hit a barn from the inside.

So let’s look at the positives. Why not? It won’t take long. England improved from their performance against South Africa the week before: they rose from humiliation to merely rotten. If they can maintain this level, they will finish fourth in the RBS Six Nations Championship.

It would have been a much better idea for this new regime to start off against Italy and Scotland rather than the three best teams in the world. After all, Fabio Capello didn’t begin his time as manager of the England football team with matches against Brazil, Argentina and Spain. Any faults the England team have have been exposed without compromise.

The question that remains is whether there has been any point at all to these three matches, so far as England’s attempts to rebuild a rugby team are concerned. The idea is that players will “learn” from these events, but what will they learn? Only that individually and collectively they are not good enough. This is a new team, a very inexperienced team, and this problem is compounded by being coached by a man who knows nothing about coaching. The coach’s basic techniques are a voyage of discovery for Martin Johnson.

Johnson was an exceptional player with quite extraordinary leadership qualities, but in the England camp today, he is just one more man in L-plates. And though it is easy to point out the problems, the solutions are light-years distant. He dropped his fly half of choice, Danny Cipriani, and in came the ever-loyal understudy, Toby Flood, who showed us, once again, exactly why he’s an understudy. But Johnson can’t chuck the whole team out and pick brilliant multicapped players in every position — they don’t exist.

So what is Johnson to do? The answer is obvious: he must step back five years and become once again the player he was in 2003, the leader, the organiser, the disciplined, remorseless, finished product, the man who played referees like a Stradivarius and formed a reference point of excellence for his entire side.

What Johnson’s England team lack is himself: an on-pitch leader, a person who can play hot and think cool, who can dictate the pace of a match, put the fear of God into the opposition and inspire all those around him to play a notch better than their best; a man who, above all, expects to win.

Instead, Johnson must stand on the touchline and watch a bunch of tyros give a series of absurdly ill-disciplined performances — four yellow cards in a match! — and who, when it matters most, cannot take responsibility for themselves.

Afterwards, Johnson talked about lack of concentration, but the problems are much deeper than that. All these past three matches have done is to make these problems a great deal worse. A new team, a young team, an optimistic team, a brave team have been given three brutal lessons in how to lose. Humiliation has been followed by a dead-cat bounce against New Zealand. England got what they deserved, nothing less, nothing more. It is Johnson’s task to make sure that come the new year, they deserve better.