If I had a point for every person who, since Saturday afternoon, has asked me, “What went wrong with England?”, I could have beaten the Springboks on my own.

Nothing, however, went particularly wrong with England on Saturday. No area of the game imploded. No element or facet of the England game went dramatically backwards. At least not from the previous Saturday or even from the past few years.

This is simply where England are. The team have been on a long-term low. There have been blips: the knockout phases in the World Cup in France last year, a dazzle of flashing heels from Shane Geraghty, Danny Cipriani’s virtuoso performance against Ireland. But on the whole, where England struggled on Saturday, against an expert team of world champions, is where they have struggled for five years since Martin Johnson lifted the World Cup.

The return of Johnson, in a different guise, has simply proved that he has no magic wand. A glower of the beetle brows, or whatever cliché we use to make the point that he is a bit scary, has made no discernible, immediate impact. And maybe it was unreasonable to expect him to be an overnight sensation in a suit. A honeymoon period would have been nice, though.

Yet without that, England remain a team whose forwards have teeth that are blunt, whose backs struggle for ideas and penetration, where there is an apparent void of leadership and where no one (yet) has filled that other void that Jonny Wilkinson so regularly leaves behind him. And with every new reinvention of the management or coaching staff, a slightly different set of players are coining the same post-match observations about standing strong, sticking together, showing character, accentuating positives and learning from mistakes.

This all goes under the general title “rebuilding”. How much time is required for rebuilding, though, until the England team again become a structure of note is a real, genuine concern. England seem to have been rebuilding since the walls of 2003 came tumbling down, yet every time since that, any apparent foundations that have been laid have subsequently been blown apart.

The Andy Robinson era at least had a semblance of a honeymoon. Brian Ashton had his “babes” (the Six Nations in 2007). Yet still England are a work in progress. No, not even that; the progress, if that is not a complete misuse of the word, has only just begun.

There can surely be little in the job description of an England player that stinks more than the obligation to follow a bad defeat with having to go and answer questions from the press. These days there are even individual press officers assigned to each player to ensure that they are not detained too long.

But thus it was, on Saturday evening, that the majority of the England players performed their media duties with the general tone being, again, about showing character and standing strong.

There is no doubt, here, that they meant what they said. However, there was also a recognition of the exceedingly vulnerable position they suddenly find themselves in.

Toby Flood gave warning against “wallowing in our own self-pity”. Tom Rees acknowledged that, after a scoreline like that “it is difficult to turn it round. It’s far easier to really beat yourself up and carry it all the way through to the next game”. Jamie Noon, who is one of the more experienced, wiser heads, said that the job would be easier if the media went easy on them and did not “pound on this extra pressure”. “Some of the onus is on you guys \ and what you say,” he said. “We need to gee guys up. Everybody, as a nation, needs to get behind us.”

Noon, however, knows as well as anyone that Twickenham, let alone the entire nation, does not “get behind” an underperforming team and that the media do not perform a cheerleading role.

Self-belief has to come from within and here lies the issue. When you have lost to the Wallabies, been plundered by the Springboks and have the best team in the world to face next, it is easier to go backwards than forwards. It is tough to build and improve when on a cycle of defeat, when you are being reminded not of how good you are but of how much better are the opposition.

This is the Groundhog Day cycle: England teams failing to build, failing to learn from their mistakes, failing to come back better. In Johnson’s day as a player, the England team were a steam train propelled by a wealth of wins and they learnt each time they hit the buffers of defeat.

Losing teams, though, struggle for momentum. That is where this England team finds itself. Restarting, once again.