Ah yes, but there’s a lot of positives England can take from this. I mean, not everybody gets the opportunity to dress up like a prat and then get booed off the field. It’s character-building. They can only get stronger as a result. Admittedly, they got weaker after the woeful display of nine days back, but they will surely be world-beaters in time to take on New Zealand on Saturday.

It’s all about building, isn’t it? England are only a couple of matches away from being really, really wonderful. Or at least really semi-competent. So in the meantime, we can forgive the odd performance of complete ineptitude, even when it is followed by another performance of complete ineptitude. All right?

So what’s the verdict after England struggled to beat Argentina at Twickenham? Martin Johnson, the team manager, looked up his book of Fergie Tricks and went for the chapter called Talking Up The Opposition. God, they were good. Brilliant. Really hard to play against. I mean, those guys were seriously fab.

They weren’t. They were about as good as England. England weren’t good enough to make them look second-rate, but that’s because England are also — when they’re on their best game — second-rate.

It was a difficult day to play rugby, with a swirling wind and a wet ball — and God forbid that we should ever get inclement weather in November in England. In all sports, difficult conditions are best seen as an opportunity to unsettle the opposition. Instead, England unsettled themselves.

Let’s remember that England won. Which is jolly good, of course. In all sports, we must bow the knee to a W. And hey, they scored a try, which is almost unprecedented. The game turned on a line break from James Haskell. Without that moment of appetite and vision, England would have been in far worse trouble.

They ended the match pinned on their own goalline with the referee awarding four successive penalties against Argentina. This was not a win that reflects dominance or certainty. It was more of a thanks-God-I-owe-you-one sort of victory.

The big talking point was whether or not England were worse winning against Argentina then they were losing against Australia. The consensus is that despite the W, they were worse this week. Clearly, this is a team that can build from one ineptitude to the next.

It began with those absurd purple outfits. This is a side of fragile confidence, so the idea of sending them out in figure-hugging purple was not calculated to improve things. Any sporting body that accepts money for making its athletes look and feel ridiculous has got its priorities so thoroughly warped that there is no point in talking about sport any more.

After the pathetic pre-match card stunt, it was inevitable that a virus of paper dart manufacture should sweep the stadium. So there was the England rugby team, clad in purple, as a purple rain of paper darts fell all about them, these gently nose-diving items telling an eloquent tale of the autumn internationals and England’s performance in them.

Could Johnson not have said no? Could he not have given the marketing men the eyebrows look and said, I’m not having my boys dressed up as clowns, not for anybody’s money? Johnson refused to back down to the President of Ireland when he was a player; now it seems that the sport’s money-men have him where they want him.

The England team that Johnson captained had a strong sense of identity. They backed down to nobody. They were the elite. They had a powerful corporate identity. They felt good, and when they swaggered out at Twickenham — dressed in white — you knew they were something to reckon with.

But the team Johnson manages, well, they came out in purple, full of oo-er, hope the ball doesn’t come to me, and I say, chaps, anybody know what we’re supposed to do? The match began with a great shared emotion: one of these days, we really must get organised.

There was a horrible rash of individual errors, but let’s not pick on them. The errors came about because of a vast corporate self-doubt. This was a team that seemed to possess only one certainty: oh God, wouldn’t it be just awful if we lost?

These days, the traditional England attack goes — on the rare occasions a ball actually emerges within ten minutes of the breakdown — from one side of the pitch to the other, gradually but inexorably working its way backwards. That has been precisely the pattern of the improvement since Johnson came in as manager.

That Twickenham crowd baffles me. After the booing at the interval, by a few thousand only, the merest hint of an England resurgence had them shouting and cheering and singing Chariots. There is no crowd in sport so loyal, so determined to hope for the best.

No team could walk on to the pitch with greater goodwill. Even after Saturday’s heavy petting with calamity, they got cheered. There was no football-crowd notion of turning on your own. But England staggered off the pitch to generous applause, knowing they had got away with something. So bring on the All Blacks, eh?