So what did Brian Ashton lack? Hair, inches, ego for a start; the former head coach looked too old for the tabloid world of sports coverage. Had he been 20 years younger with a full head of hair and an ability to jump up and down in his stadium seat in the scolded cat manner of his predecessors, the populist pandering for Martin Johnson would have been, at the very least, delayed.

Image should have nothing to do with the position of anyone in coaching but it is a national obsession. Think back to the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, Menzies Campbell, whose age was used to intimate lack of vigour. It was the same with Ashton.

In contrast, Johnson booms with presence. It was his first attribute as a player before he matured under the wise counsel of, among others, Sir Clive Woodward and Ashton, into the thinking man’s forward. On the field, his very name was a weapon in itself. Much younger than Ashton, the 38-year-old is dark-haired, brooding and with a World Cup winner’s medal and a deserved reputation as a leader, whereas Ashton had the considerable disadvantage of having none of these. Johnson also has a greater ego than the dismissed coach and that, unlike the ridiculous cosmetics of the debate, really does matter.

Johnson, having never managed or coached a rugby union side at any level, must have quite some ego to take the team manager’s job believing that he can handle both the rest of the world and the RFU. This is no vice in the man; quite the opposite. Away from the action, Johnson is a modest, amiable giant, but deep within his brooding depths he has always backed himself to succeed; he did it as a player, and by accepting this poisoned chalice he has shown that the three years he has spent away from the game - and even longer away from the Test scene - have done nothing whatsoever to diminish his unwavering belief in his own judgment.

Woodward had it by the bucketload, and needed it. When defeats occur, as they inevitably will if any coach has the courage to pursue a vision, being No 1 is a lonely place to be. Woodward rode a mountain of early abuse as England blew Grand Slams before winning the big one. Ego was his great ally; he and England would have failed without it.

Andy Robinson studied his mentor at close quarters and played the ego game without ever possessing that innate self-belief. In the end, his unyielding pursuit of this precious substance led to self-delusion and an unhappy ending. Ashton, older and wiser, was simply too decent a bloke to bother with the wrappings of the power games and told it as it was from the first day.

How tough had the preparation been prior to the World Cup? Bloody tough, he said, and admitted to human vulnerability. How shaken was he by the 36-0 defeat in the pool stages? Bloody shaken. He was asked questions and he told the truth as most of us, in his situations, would have seen it.

Here is where it unravelled, indicating that maybe he was not cut out to be the Head Man for England. When Woodward made an awful mess of the 2005 Lions tour, he returned from Auckland airport convinced that the series could have been won had a few small details dropped his way. It was deluded, but to be the very best in this job such delusions are part of the package. Listen to those outstanding football managers, Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, in reaction to defeat. The excuses are never just excuses, they are the toiling workings of minds that cannot believe they could fail.

Ashton was always too rational to indulge in such an essential form of sporting insanity because he saw the frailties and his players knew he knew it. The scent of weakness was in the air; it was something the decidedly sensitive nose of Lawrence Dallaglio picked up during the World Cup.

Lack of ego also led Ashton to blur his rugby principles. Whereas Woodward listened to the advice of his fellow coaches during selection meetings, he always listened from a distance. Good guy that Ashton is, he allowed the opinions of others to drive him to places he had never visited in his previous 60 years. The absence of James Haskell and the inclusion of Andy Farrell in the England team were just two of the World Cup errors he would not have made had he the ego to back himself.

Egos, too, tend to have less room for the nobler sentiments such as loyalty. Post-World Cup was the time to stretch the vision beyond the immediate horizon, but Ashton lacked the brutal edge to drop Phil Vickery as his captain. Vickery had stood solidly by his coach during the post-tournament fallout and for that reason Ashton refused to consider stripping him of the captaincy in order to play the younger, and better, Matt Stevens. Had Ashton not given a damn what anyone else thought he might have begun the rebuilding of England early enough to have kept his job.

Instead he could not do what he knew he had to do in order to liberate the England attack – drop Jonny Wilkinson. Like Robinson before him, the 2003 World Cup winner was an important indicator of the manager’s strength. Robinson made him captain when injured, surely aware that Wilkinson has always been a loner in the way that he prepares and plays.

Ashton had guided and watched the stellar progress of young Danny Cipriani and understood that he possessed the assets to elevate England from the mediocrity of their midfield play. He understood it but lacked the confidence to play him until the last game of the season, when Wilkinson’s collapse in Edinburgh had made it an easier call to make.

Suddenly England were inventive and original behind the scrum. That was the true Ashton but it was, of course, too late. He lacked the ego-driven self-belief in his singular vision. Had Cipriani played behind a dominant pack against Wales at Twickenham, England would have started the season with a victory, and defeat in Edinburgh (far from likely given the radical difference in style) would have been merely one blip. Instead, another win in France was the result regarded as the one-off irrelevance.

Woodward would have thanked Wilkinson and Vickery for their sterling service to the nation and promptly dropped them. Had he time for poetry he would probably have quoted John Dryden, who wrote “the most may err as grossly as the few”. Ashton, less certain of his own infallibility, backed away from a decision that would have been greeted with public outcries of anger – until the case was unanswerable.

He waited too long to pick Cipriani and produce his vision of the game, based around flexible thinking. He bemoaned the inability of senior players to think on their feet but he lacked the fearlessness that comes with a certain touch of needful arrogance to set his team towards his own distinctive vision, for which he was chosen to manage England.

A few months ago in these pages, my old teammate Jerry Guscott mused whether Ashton was too good for England. The truth is that he was insufficiently bad.

Barnes’s England XV

J Lewsey; P Sackey, J Noon, S Geraghty, J Simpson-Daniel; D Cipriani (capt), H Ellis; A Sheridan, L Mears, M Stevens, S Shaw, S Borthwick, J Haskell, N Easter, M Lipman

Now that experience has been discounted as the vital commodity, why not go the whole hog and appoint as captain somebody who is not a stopgap leader but a player with the vision? If Martin Johnson is a brave rather than a mad choice, the same can be said for Danny Cipriani