Graphic: the key clash: Nick Kennedy v Ali Williams

One of the roles of the senior player is to maintain a sense of perspective. Thus it is that Phil Vickery made a mental note this week of the plaque in the players' tunnel at Twickenham bearing the legend “England 53 South Africa 3”, the result of the game played there in 2002.

“The shoe has been on the other foot,” Vickery, the most-capped player in the squad, said on the eve of Saturday's game against New Zealand at Twickenham that surely the most ardent England fan expects to be lost. It would be an act of wild optimism even to expect a comeback such as that of 1997, when, in the fourth game of that autumn's series, England forced a 26-26 draw with the All Blacks.

Sport, though, offers vivid swings in mood and performance and this is what Vickery, who will win his 68th cap in the last match of the Investec Challenge Series, the manager and coaches have been drumming into their young colleagues since the humbling 42-6 loss to the Springboks a week ago. Where there were jeers then for England, so there were for South Africa when they lost 19-0 to New Zealand in Cape Town as recently as August.

“We may never have as tough a series to play as this team has had,” Martin Johnson, the team manager, said of a month in which England have beaten the Pacific Islanders but lost to Australia and South Africa. Given that today's game with New Zealand is the third meeting with the world's No 1 team in six months, he will not be short of evidence over which players can cope with so rarefied an atmosphere when he refines the squad that will do duty in next year's RBS Six Nations Championship.

“You build relationships with people,” Johnson said. “Some of these guys I don't know particularly well, so we're finding out about each other and these tough weeks are part of it. We'll find out more about ourselves [against New Zealand]. At the end of it we'll have played the three best teams in the world, we'll have been in camp for five weeks, coping with Test-match rugby and the pressures that are on you mentally. You can't give players that experience.”

So is survival the best that England can hope for, a degree of respectability? To Johnson, every international is about survival but, more than that, it is the ability to impose some part of your game on the opposition. England have not gone short of possession in their three games this month but have been singularly unable to make it count where it matters, on the scoreboard.

The coaching staff believe that England created five tryscoring opportunities against the Springboks, which overlooks the fact that they could not beat opponents who made their tackles. Yet this is the only peg on which they can hang their hats, the line breaks, the half-chances that, in the international arena, must be made whole, which is what New Zealand do time and again.

Based on their energetic display a week ago, the England scrum - in which Tim Payne's display at loose-head prop made the return of Andrew Sheridan less than automatic even if Sheridan had been fit - should hold its own and the lineout could be an interesting contest. But this is not where the game will be won or lost - that will happen at the perennially contentious area of the breakdown and the interpretation on the day of Alain Rolland, the referee.

Everything England have done there this season has been sluggish, a slow, sideways trundle. Traditionally this is New Zealand's playground, with Richie McCaw the gang leader, but, as Johnson observed, “it's no longer just about the back rows. Southern-hemisphere teams, from 1 to 15, are good at the breakdown. You can have the best technique in the world but you have to have the attitude to go with it.”

The present New Zealand team have an innate understanding of what must be done to clear bodies from the ball so that their half backs can be precise in their decision-making. On the face of it, Jimmy Cowan is far from a settled incumbent at scrum half but if he has a black wall in front of him, England have little prospect of knocking him off his game, which will leave Dan Carter to glide majestically around Twickenham.

Given where New Zealand were only a year ago, speculating on their worst World Cup performance, their coaching team's positions in doubt and quality players leaving in droves to earn their pay in sterling, euros and yen, this has been a wonderful ten months. True, they lost twice in the Tri-Nations but still won the tournament, they beat Australia in Hong Kong en route to Great Britain and now stand on the brink of their third grand-slam tour to the north.

Just to add icing to the cake, they announced yesterday the extension of their longstanding sponsorship agreement with adidas to 2019 amid talk of a “mutual commitment to globalising the All Blacks team and the sport of rugby”.

There is speculation in the United States that Denver, in Colorado, will play host next year to a Bledisloe Cup game and the financial guarantee from the sportswear firm gives the New Zealand Rugby Union some hope of retaining players and extra funding for its domestic game.

When they assemble in London on Monday for the 2011 World Cup pool draw, the All Blacks should have all sorts of reasons to be cheerful. England, fifth in the global rankings at the moment, could force their way into the top four seeds if they beat New Zealand but they and Argentina could be leapfrogged if Wales beat Australia by 15 points or more in Cardiff on Saturday.

The southern-hemisphere nations cannot be disturbed in the top three positions: the quarrel for fourth place has Argentina on 81.56 ranking points, England 81.11 and Wales 79.55. If they wish to avoid being paired with a Tri-Nations country, only victory will do for England this afternoon.