Jim Mallinder, the director of rugby at Northampton, has emerged as a favourite to play a senior role in the England coaching team under Martin Johnson. There will, at last, be some official news from the RFU today on the brave new world of the structure for the national team, but when the future is being settled upon at Twickenham this morning, it will be less the rubber-stamping of Johnson’s appointment in the role of team manager that is the issue, more the make-up of the team around him.

As is generally the way at Twickenham, decisions and settling on appointments is a slow process and it seems that Johnson, when he is confirmed in his new job, will also want to take stock and use the time available to him to put in place the coaching team he feels he needs. However, given that he does not envisage Brian Ashton, the head coach, as part of it, his only urgent requirement is someone to marshal the England backs division.

It seems that the rest of the coaching staff — John Wells, Mike Ford and Graham Rowntree — will stay in place to lead the England team on the summer tour to New Zealand, at the very least. However, this leaves the gaping lack of specialist expertise in the threequarters, which is why the appointment of one new coach, besides Johnson, is a priority before the summer tour.

This is where Mallinder, 42, comes in. He may be low in profile but his CV as a coach is excellent. He won two caps on England’s 1997 tour to Argentina and represented Sale Sharks nearly 400 times. On retiring as a player in 2001, he remained at the club as a coach and won the equivalent of the European Challenge Cup in 2002. Two years later he joined the RFU coaching staff, when he was handed the reins of England Saxons and the under-21 team, who were undefeated in 2006.

All of this sounds impressive, although the problem, as Johnson found when he was unable to tease either Pat Howard out of Australia or Shaun Edwards from Wales, will be in persuading him to come on board. Mallinder joined Northampton only last summer and has two years left on his three-year contract. It would cost the RFU about £500,000 to buy him out of his job, although the sticking point may be less the finances and more the career move.

Mallinder may have achieved promotion this season with Northampton, but he will feel that his achievements there add up to much only when his teams have been tested in the Guinness Premiership. Furthermore, having held a responsible position within the RFU coaching structure, it is questionable whether he would see a return to Twickenham in the role of backs coach to the senior team as a sufficient step up.

The other name that is understood to be under consideration is Mike Catt, who combines playing and coaching at London Irish and whom Johnson knows well through their many years as England players and as World Cup winners. Johnson will also be aware that Catt’s knowledge and coaching expertise was, behind the scenes, instrumental in lifting England from the dreadful lows at the start of last autumn’s World Cup.

The complete details of Johnson’s coaching team will not, however, be available for public consumption today. The management board, which meets to finalise any such decisions, will merely be presented with another report from Rob Andrew, the director of elite rugby, which will include a form of road map for the way forward.

Andrew will make his recommendations — which will, one presumes, be the recommendations of Johnson — and will detail Wells, Ford and Rowntree to lead the summer tour, for which Johnson is understood to have made himself unavailable because his wife is expecting their second child.

At the very least, one hopes that today’s announcement will put to an end the inept handling of the future of Ashton, who has maintained a quiet dignity for the past month while his employers have been busy rushing around trying to find someone else to do his job.