England supporters may not have enjoyed their increasingly expensive journeys to Twickenham in the past month but they are not disenchanted, Rob Andrew claimed yesterday. “They understand what the team is going through, where the team is in the Test cycle and what Martin Johnson has been handed in terms of trying to rebuild something that needs rebuilding,” Andrew, the RFU director of elite rugby, said.

There will be some in the £85 seats who do not necessarily agree. England's record in November was poor: three defeats out of four, the single success coming against the Pacific Islanders, 115 points and ten tries conceded and a global ranking of sixth, which, on form, is higher than England deserve.

It is Andrew's contention that the pain must be endured now if England are to make up for the lean, post-2003 World Cup years. “I think the fans understand the situation and the support they gave the team on Saturday [against New Zealand] was fantastic,” he said. “We haven't got an old guard to go back to.”

That is not exactly true, in that veterans such as Josh Lewsey, Mike Tindall, Ben Kay and Andy Gomarsall are playing regularly, but Andrew acknowledged the absence of a player-development process in the past five years.

He even accepted the strictures of Eddie Jones, the former Australia coach now director of rugby at Saracens, who made barbed comments this week about the failure of the RFU to put the requisite playing structures in place.

“The academy structure has produced its first generation of England players - Danny Care, Danny Cipriani, James Haskell and so on - but we do need the help of the Guinness Premiership with our young players,” Andrew said.

He is optimistic that changes aimed at making a smaller National League One completely professional and the prospect of what is now the EDF Energy Cup becoming an under-25 tournament will benefit younger players, but Andrew also seeks a stronger A League so that players who took England to the final of the world under-20 tournament in June can be certain of regular competitive rugby.

“People like Nathan Catt, Joe Gray and Alex Corbisiero gave us our best under-20 front row ever and I'm glad Eddie is making these points,” Andrew said. “We need him and the Premiership clubs to help. You do need a model which has a degree of succession planning in it, like Manchester United.”

Catt and Corbisiero have played regularly this season but two of their colleagues, Joe Simpson and the England Under-20 captain, Hugo Ellis, are at the opposite end of the scale - partly, in Simpson's case, because of injuries, but also because their club, London Wasps, have lost form and the coaches are not eager to throw youngsters into a struggling environment.

But Andrew, who managed England's dismal summer tour to New Zealand in June, argues that a mere four weeks into Johnson's three-year tenure as team manager is far too early to provoke criticism of a system that he is trying to turn around. The fallow years that followed 2003 were reversed temporarily, he says, to attempt to make a successful defence of the World Cup in 2007, provoking the recall of players such as Jason Robinson, Lawrence Dallaglio and Mike Catt to provide the experience so evidently absent last month.

The situation is the corollary of two strands: the new agreement between the RFU and the Premiership clubs that gave the England coaching staff much longer access to the players and in which Andrew was instrumental, and the decision to appoint Johnson last spring. The union's management board sold itself on the former England captain, at the expense of Brian Ashton, and now has to watch his growing pains as a manager.

Johnson's first impulse has been to find consistency in his playing group. “We don't want to make vast changes to the squad,” he said, in the knowledge that a revised elite party will be announced on January 14, three weeks before the RBS Six Nations Championship. “Last week we had our best players on the field. There isn't suddenly a host of players out there playing better rugby.

“I'll be interested to see how our guys go back with their clubs in Europe over the next fortnight, but there's no point my giving them a run of games and then chopping them in mid-stream. They need, frankly, to improve, but young guys have taken a lot of knocks against the best in the world in the last month and they think they can compete against them.”

Andrew's concern is that the support system for Johnson and his coaching staff should be renewed. The structure that Clive Woodward was able to build up as England head coach has been allowed to wither and the main victims were Woodward's successors, Andy Robinson and Ashton.

Johnson has every confidence in his coaches, whatever the shortcomings that have been apparent in areas such as the breakdown and the kicking game. But that confidence must be justified by better results in the Six Nations, otherwise the forbearance of the Twickenham crowd will wear thin.