Personally, I thought that they could have blamed the sevens - it is misfortune for England to have lost one open-side flanker in Lewis Moody (Achilles) and doubly so to have lost another in Tom Rees (knee ligament). It would not have been weak, therefore, for Brian Ashton, the head coach, to have dwelt on this, to have pointed out that all those collisions and all those scraps that the England team gorged on in the first half were suddenly theirs no more.

There cannot be a shred of doubt that the growth of Wales, in particular in the form of Martyn Williams, in the second half, was anything but inextricably linked to the absence of a flyer to oppose him. Suddenly, Wales had ball aplenty. Suddenly, the game changed.

Yet the respect goes out to Ashton because he refused to take refuge behind these two injuries - and, indeed, the plethora of others. The head coach's point, which was echoed by others, was that the sudden lack of a genuine open-side was divorced from the sudden lack of composure that ran like wildfire through his troops and introduced the two and a half minutes of un-England-like disarray that lost them the match.

Two-and-a-half minutes to concede two tries, both converted, is a fast turnaround. Ashton's point was that England were not exactly cut to ribbons by mind-bogglingly superior rugby. “I'm not that convinced that Wales had to work desperately hard to score those tries,” he said. Or, to translate, Wales did not earn them, it was England who handed them over.

“One of our key messages before the game was not to feed them,” Ashton said. “We were pretty good at that in the second half; we took everything out of the cupboard and put it on the table.”

The absence of a genuine No 7 surely played a role in this. The ascendancy of Williams in the second half produced twofold gains: it started to win Wales decent ball and it surely started the process that induced England's astonishing implosion; it made them become the defending team rather than the attacking team and thus it started to tire them; it rammed home the point that the runaway victory that seemed so assured in the first half was no longer theirs for the taking. Basically, it reintroduced to England the concept of pressure.

And yet Ashton was right not to use the No 7 situation as an excuse. Pressure? England have been here before, every first-class rugby player has been. England know how to cope. The miracle of their World Cup journey was built mostly on how they dealt with extreme pressure. Jonny Wilkinson dines out on pressure, he is the master of pressure management.

Andy Gomarsall's surprising rise in last year's World Cup was largely because of nous, composure, experience - all those elements that seemed to desert him when Wales were bearing down on England and he was flipping up a series of little passes to anyone near him, anyone to take the ball, the pressure, off his shoulders.

And Phil Vickery, too. Although how strange to replace your captain, as Ashton did, straight after the first Wales try, when they had just drawn level and all England needed desperately was a steady voice in the huddle calming racing pulses.

Yet despite Vickery's bizarre exit, Saturday's implosion was astonishing. Composure? It's an England trademark, which is why players and management alike appeared so non-plussed after the match. “I can't explain it,” Ashton said.

Simon Shaw said: “When you concede tries like that, there's not a lot you can say. One-off mistakes like that? Apart from having a go at the guy, there's not a lot you can say.”

No one who witnessed this match will need these references explaining. Ben Kay (“we should have kicked down to the corner and held them there”) went so far as to finger three individual errors, for which we can list Gomarsall's charged-down kick plus his management of that phase of the game when he passed England backwards and backwards into deeper trouble. This was the precedent for the two and a half minutes that lost it for England: Wilkinson's long, ballooning pass over Danny Cipriani's head to Paul Sackey's feet and then Iain Balshaw's charged-down kick.

Gomarsall, Wilkinson and Balshaw have an average age of 30 and average 44 caps a man. England's successes have long been built on experience; the question for Ashton is: Why, suddenly on Saturday, this was no longer the case?