Is that all you’ve got? The famous question asked by The Australian newspaper of the England rugby team, accompanied by a picture of Jonny Wilkinson. The answer to this question, since England went on to win the World Cup a couple of weeks later, was presumably no.

Ask the same question today, though, and the answer can only be yes. Wilkinson came back to the England team after yet another prolonged absence for injury, and gave us a performance of drive, power, purpose, imagination and flair. It was almost enough to distract you from the inadequacies of the rest of the team.

In the first 20 minutes, it looked as if a newly forged, Jonny-centric team would cruise to a famous victory. In the first England attack, the ball was fed back to Wilkinson, and with the understated elegance that comes from a perfect economy of movement, he dropped a goal in a soaring parabola of never-been-away excellence.

But then it became clear that the team was not Jonny-centric after all. Wilkinson was not playing an out-and-out fly-half role: the ball more often being spun out to Shane Geraghty. Why? It’s not as if Geraghty was doing much good. There was obviously a fiendishly cunning plan at work. Me, I’d have thought that if you had Wilkinson, coming in from his new club, Toulon, in the form of his life, it might be a sound wheeze to give him the ball.

Still, Wilkinson at least got to kick the penalties, and landed both his opportunities. So he scored all nine of England’s points, but alas, Australia got to grips with things in the second half and attacked relentlessly. But Wilkinson can still tackle. It is one of the great contradictions in sport: seeing this polite and diffident man smashing people up with a berserker’s energy and a surgeon’s precision.

There were long passages of very decent defensive play, periods that lulled you into the belief that England might somehow steal a result. All it needed was a moment of inspiration from the England players, one touch of magic to break the Australian line.

What inspiration? What magic? It was like trying to light a fire with a drowned matchbox. Not a single bloody spark. Most England attacks were grotesque — two lines of players solemnly staring at a heap of bodies, and not a ball in sight. This was rugby played on a geological timescale, waiting aeon after aeon for the shifting tectonic plates of the England team to produce a ball. When it eventually appeared, the attack went excitingly from one side to the other, gradually but inexorably drifting backwards.

If there was hope, it was in Wilkinson. There was one moment of perfection. He chased his own kick, ran past a forest of Australians, gathered and delivered the ball perfectly to Paul Hodgson, the replacement scrum half. At full speed, it looked like a volleyball flip, but the slo-mo revealed a still greater skill: you could see the give of the hands and the deliberate pass. It deserved better, but the Australian defence was up to it.

There was another moment when Wilkinson made a break along the right wing and imaginatively flipped the ball back, but alas, Mark Cueto seemed unaware that this sort of thing was now in Wilkinson’s Frenchified repertoire, and he had already overrun the ball.

So that’s it. Wilkinson was England’s only points-gatherer, their best attacker, and the best defender. With better players and a coherent game plan — one that involved giving him the ball, for example — Wilkinson might have made more of a difference.

But as it was, England were sunk by a combination of Australian superiority and English ineptitude.

Wilkinson was gloriously Wilkinsonian afterwards. He gave an extended verdict on the match and the immense number of positives to be found therein, if you could only see it with the right eyes. It was a rugby version of the Molly Bloom soliloquy.

Apparently England needed to put down a marker, and now they have done so. Well, never mind about markers and positives. If that was a marker, let’s hope it marks the low-point of the season, and as for positives, I saw an awful lot of negatives, myself, but none of them concerning Wilkinson. He is back: a man unsated, a man with more to do, a man with appetite heightened rather than diminished by tribulation.

If there are positives to be found, they all lie in Wilkinson. As a result, there is a genuine and thrilling new possibility for the England rugby team. This is an opportunity for Wilkinson to stop being the loyal and humble genius and to become the leader.

If Wilkinson can make this team his own — if he is allowed to, if he has the equipment to do so — then England might actually make something of this season. I’d like to see Wilkinson ceasing to sink himself with far too much generosity into the common cause. I’d like him to dominate, to take over, to become the presiding spirit of the England team as Martin Johnson was in 2003. I’d like to see a newspaper show a picture of Wilkinson and ask, is that all you’ve got? And the answer to be, yes. And it’s better than anything you lot can come up with.