Considering that his critics accused Brian Ashton of being too much of a visionary and not enough the pragmatist, England’s head coach has not done a bad job in turning an average set of players – technically speaking – into World Cup runners-up.

Yet somehow, where Sir Clive Woodward was eulogised for his role in 2003, Ashton has not been, as the players have received the credit for lifting England from the scrap heap in which they found themselves five weeks ago after that 36-0 loss to the summit of the game.

Ashton has been criticised for indecision in selection – and there have been mood swings to be sure, but does anybody remember Andy Long? The Bath hooker was only one of Woodward’s many early selection blunders. Dropping Jonny Wilkinson was another before he mastered the art brilliantly and merged a combination of great talent and useful-fitting parts into a World Cup-winning team. Selection is a skill and it did not happen overnight for Woodward, but he had two years before his first World Cup to try players. Ashton has had 10 months.

“Yes,” his knockers say, “but it was the players who took it into their own hands and turned affairs around.” Which players? Phil Vickery, Ben Kay, Lewis Moody, Martin Corry, Josh Lewsey? All these players presided over the four-year slump, so why, one has to ask, did they keep silent then?

The reason is so plain to see that people are looking straight through it. Ashton’s philosophy is a simple one: to empower players to think for themselves. This is not one of the great teams of modern times, but it is an intelligent one, having jumped from the back of the class to the front in no time.

That is Ashton’s influence. Having worked with him on and off for the best part of a decade, I know he is a gentle cajoler, not a booming voice.

When I first trained under him on an England tour to New Zealand in 1985, he was forever questioning the automatic way English players thought. He would never tell you if something was wrong, he would quietly question what you hoped to achieve. The Lancastrian quit on England one year later, despairing for the English game. He was not to resurface until the late 1980s, when, as a teacher at King’s School in Bruton, Somerset, Jack Rowell asked him to take a Bath backs session. Just one night was all it took for us to be won over by the originality of his thinking, but that was only the obvious side of Ashton that we saw. You couldn’t tell a headstrong Bath backline what to do, but Ashton found huge improvement in everyone by simply convincing us that the fresh ideas were our own. It took a few years before we realised that he was more than just a bloody good thinker and we were not all as smart as we believed.

Ashton has been a brilliant success. Getting players to think for themselves is the greatest skill of a coach. He has learnt from his spell as Ireland’s head coach. There he tried to force his vision on a side not ready for individual thinking. Speak to the Irish administrators of the time and they will say he was useless. Speak to players such as Paul Wallace and they will tell you he was ahead of his time.

When he left the Woodward camp, the quality of attacking play declined, but when the call for the main job came from Rob Andrew, it was not so much an immediate World Cup he yearned for as a mission to bring England back to the point they had been at when he was last involved four years beforehand.

For all the nonsense written and talked, Ashton has long been more than a guru of the running game. His partnership with the supreme Bath pragmatist and great rugby brain, Rowell, was the making of the coach.

This England team played as it did because that was its best route to success. With the four years he must be given by Andrew as a reward for this profound overachievement, Ashton will begin the task of rewriting England as a team with the ability to play it fast and loose as well as big and strong.

It is not always the man with the loudest voice who has the greatest influence. The World Cup over, Ashton can get on with the task of bringing the brain back into the game.

Stuart Barnes won 10 caps for England between 1984 and 1993