Twickenham yesterday resembled a game of musical chairs in which someone had forgotten that one chair needs to be removed. When the RFU's management board concluded the day's business, Brian Ashton remained in place as England's head coach and negotiations continue to find a suitable team manager.

That may, or may not, be Martin Johnson but, in the great tradition of rugby union, there will be further meetings before a decision is made. Evidently, Rob Andrew, who interrupted a family holiday in Greece, offered a report on England's situation convincing enough to hold off the hawks on the management board. Andrew, the RFU's director of elite rugby, will continue to seek a team manager and an additional backs coach, and remains at his desk today before rejoining his family, but there was no indication that Ashton and his embattled lieutenants, John Wells and Mike Ford, are surplus to requirements.

Andrew may have chosen to remind the board that Ashton's record bears favourable comparison to that of Clive Woodward, the World Cup-winning coach, in his initial period of office. England have played 22 matches under Ashton's direction, including a World Cup tournament in which they were runners-up against all the odds, and have won 12 of them. In addition, all but seven of those 22 were played on foreign soil and, after a horrible run of away form between 2004 and 2006, Ashton is rightly proud that an unhappy trend has been reversed.

Woodward, who became the RFU's first full-time coach in 1997, won ten and lost ten of his first 22 games, the other two being drawn. Fourteen were played on home soil, bearing in mind that Wales played their “home” Five Nations Championship game with England in 1999 at Wembley because the Millennium Stadium was not yet completed. If Woodward's teams have an inflated look in the points for and against columns, it is because they twice passed 100 points, against Holland in a 1998 World Cup qualifier and the United States in a 1999 World Cup warm-up match.

The landscape has changed over ten years but Woodward was given the time which, apparently, others are less than willing to grant Ashton. Yesterday's holding report by Andrew and John Spencer, chairman of Club England, was accepted unanimously and will now carry over into next month, when Andrew will make recommendations to Club England. That body, in turn, will recommend a course of action to the management board, which is due to meet next on April 30 but will convene earlier if necessary.

An RFU statement pointedly, and somewhat belatedly, congratulated England on the “significant improvement” in finishing second in the RBS Six Nations Championship and showered praise on the achievements of the England Saxons, the under-20s and England's women, none of whom lost a match in their international programmes. But Ashton remains in limbo while Johnson's name hovers in the background; the coach was originally scheduled to meet Andrew on April 14 to go through a final assessment and that process could yet stand. Clearly by then, though, Andrew will have told Club England the names on his shortlist to strengthen the existing England management.

That he approached Johnson was only a starting point and the former England captain will have been unimpressed to see his name splashed around the media. Statements about what powers Johnson would seek as team manager have been made without a word from the man himself and it seems obvious that the management board is far from clear about what role he should play and the ramifications that may have. The position of backs coach seems tailor-made for Shaun Edwards, of London Wasps, who will be hard to prise away from Wales.