I know how the England players were feeling when they sat down in their changing room after yesterday’s game. The desolation, the hurt, the horrible pain, the hopelessness that comes with the feeling that you weren’t that bad and yet you’ve been smashed. You barely look up, you don’t really want to talk about and you wish the shower water could wash it all way.

I know because I’ve been there and it’s not much fun. You might say, ‘Ah, Dallaglio, Johnson, they were winners’. You’ve forgotten all the games we lost. In 1997, in one of our first games under Clive Woodward, we also had a record defeat against New Zealand, so don’t hammer these guys. They didn’t set out to lose heavily to South Africa and New Zealand.

Sure, it’s fair to say they played badly against the Springboks, unacceptably badly in some respects, but they redeemed themselves yesterday, not on the scoreboard but in terms of performance. They played with the attitude and bloody-mindedness I expect from England players and you can’t ask for much more.

This is a mostly young England team, starting out down the international road. It is going to take time. When Woodward took over England, he had people such as Martin Johnson, Justin Leonard, Neil Back, Richard Hill, Matt Dawson and me, all of whom had just come back from South Africa, having helped the Lions beat the world champions in a three-match Test series. Johnson has inherited a far younger and much less battle-hardened group of players.

But now that the current group of players have had their baptism, a brutal and unforgiving ceremony it must be said, we will expect significant improvement. The first thing the players must do is bottle every feeling they had in that changing room; take every one of those emotions and put them in that bottle, never to be forgotten.

I remember grown men crying when we lost that Grand Slam match to Wales at Wembley in 1999 and one of the things that disgusted us was that after Scott Gibbs got that late try, we still had the time to go down the other end of the pitch and set up a winning drop goal. We panicked, we blew it, and in the changing room afterwards, we vowed, ‘Never, ever again will that happen’. Four years passed before we got the chance to win a game with a last-minute drop goal.

These past three weeks can be three of the most important weeks in the international careers of today’s players. There are other memories I’d want every player to take away from them. There was that shot of the three South African players laughing and joking on the touchline before the end of last weekend’s game. Test rugby should never be so comfortable that guys who have been replaced have the energy to laugh and joke about a game that has yet to end.

Test victories should be earned and England didn’t make the Springboks earn it. They gave it to them. Any England player who makes the Lions squad for next summer’s tour will have the opportunity to make sure the Springboks aren’t celebrating before the end of the game.

Yesterday the team fronted up and at least made the All Blacks work for their victory. But through the last 15 minutes, New Zealand were cruising a bit and Joe Rokocoko threw that extravagant inside pass somewhere in the direction of Ma’a Nonu — something he wouldn’t have dared to do in a close match. Remember it, boys, remember it.

Johnson would have been under no illusions about how difficult the job was going to be. Four matches and three defeats into his reign, he may now know it is going to be even tougher than he had expected. But there is another way of looking at this. There could hardly be a better time to be in charge of England.

Right now, no-one respects us, nobody thinks we’re any good. Our Six Nations rivals will look at the results of the last three weeks and think that even under their new manager, England are no great shakes.

What an opportunity this represents for Johnson because things are never as bad as they seem. But that is not to say that the past three weekends haven’t been sobering. I thought England would be better and more competitive against the three of the world’s best four teams. I certainly didn’t foresee England scoring only one try in three matches against the southern hemisphere powerhouses and having a scrum that buckled at critical moments against Australia and New Zealand.

What Johnson most needs to do is to look at everything again and accept the need to change things. Only he knows what changes must be made. I felt he should have started with a clean slate in relation to his coaching team and if he wanted to re-employ John Wells, Mike Ford and Graham Rowntee, that would have been fine. But they all should have been his men, appointed by him.

Yesterday’s performance was England’s best of the autumn campaign. I sensed from the moment that Twickenham crowd responded to the haka that we would get some kind of performance from England. Through the first half, it was clear that England wanted to make the breakdown a dogfight and, at whatever cost, deprive New Zealand of the quick ball off which they thrive.

And because England played at the right level of intensity, it worked. New Zealand rarely looked likely to score a try and couldn’t get into their normal rhythm. Of course there was a price to be paid for contesting the breakdown so fiercely and it was paid in penalties.

In our days under Woodward he put a number on the maximum number of penalties we were permitted to concede: 10. By half-time, England had conceded that number and two of their players had spent time in the sin-bin. But I didn’t feel the game was beyond England at that point and when they got the score back to 12-6, there was a chance of getting a draw or even a win.

Then England didn’t control their own scrum ball, New Zealand went over in the corner and the game was decided. On the plus side, the players now know the level they are at. There is a podium in world rugby and England is nowhere near it. To get there, the current generation of players are going to have to dedicate themselves as never before. In this country, we like to work at our rugby but not miss out on the good times. The England players must go back to their clubs, consider what needs to be done and decide if they want to be world-class players.

At the moment, they are good enough to play for England, but that shouldn’t satisfy them. They’ve got to realise it takes something more to be a world-class player; they’ve got to know now because they’ve just played against the best.

Some players have taken a few steps forward; Delon Armitage has done well throughout the series and did a lot of good things yesterday. I also thought Nick Kennedy did well in the circumstances and pretty much every player stepped up on what they had shown against the Springboks. But Test rugby is a harsh environment and even though England were much improved, they still weren’t good enough.

Had we got that try immediately after half-time, had we protected that ball on our put-in on the scrum that led to New Zealand’s first touchdown, you can say that we might have been closer at the end. But what does this tell us? Rugby remains a game where the basics count for everything. You’ve got to have a solid scrum but when England most needed one, they didn’t have it.

You’ve also got to be disciplined but England’s discipline wasn’t where it needed to be. This is something the team and their coaches have to address. When you create an opening, you’ve got to finish it. They will have learnt that it’s hopeless to play a good game for 55 minutes if you then wilt in the last 25.

Maybe most of all, they will now know that if you fall more than one score behind in international rugby, the game changes and there’s a good chance of a real hiding.

It has happened to England two weekends in a row. We went behind early against the Springboks and then got hammered when we chased the game and tried to force things. Teams with good defences and a good counter-attacking game will kill you when you do that and, in a way, nothing was more predictable than the easy tries we coughed up against New Zealand yesterday and South Africa last weekend.

Last weekend, we conceded an opening try to South Africa when Danie Roussouw picked up from a ruck and got past three England defenders to ground the ball. That was under-8s stuff, totally unacceptable, something that should never happen.

Yesterday was a whole lot better in many respects. England played a proper Test match, at the right level of intensity, but the cruel part is that the result wasn’t that much different. That’s how tough it is at the top table.

There is now a Six Nations Championship looming and England’s young team will enter it looking for nothing more than the respect of those they come up against.