Honesty, dignity and generosity all marked a stony-faced Stuart Lancaster’s post-match press conference at Twickenham on Saturday evening and the man who has placed so much emphasis on history and has now made it in the wrong way was also up early facing his critics the following morning.

Not only the first England head coach to fail to reach the quarter-finals of the World Cup he is the first head coach whose failure means the tournament is without the involvement of a host side in the knockout stages and that gives all sorts of people problems.

They are not, incidentally, the first host team to fail to reach the quarters as some have claimed, because all of the Home unions and France were hosting the 1991 tournament when Wales suffered their embarrassment at the hands of Western Samoa, however Lancaster has clearly given his detractors all the ammunition they need and they were lining up even before Saturday’s match.

By way of example, as we headed to the press box a long-standing, normally very reasoned friend took the chance to berate me for my previous week’s defence of the selection of Sam Burgess in the England midfield.

By the time we got to our seats I had calmed him down a bit and he had just about accepted that after all the years of watching the game he knew better than to think that the rugby league convert’s lack of nous in attack, about which he was so apoplectic, was really the reason they kept idiotically conceding penalties against Wales and so failed to close things out when they held a 10 point second half lead against injury ravaged opposition.

When I saw him in the press room afterwards I simply asked: “Was that Sam’s fault too.” He looked a wee bit sheepish and admitted that the bloke who had spent most of the match warming the bench had probably not significantly affected the outcome.

There is less likely to be any reasoning with the sycophants who were so determined that Clive Woodward, their World Cup winning manager, should be reinstated to save English rugby after the supposed debacle of 2011 and now believe they have been proven right.

These are the same sycophants who fail to remember that when Woodward trusted in youth in 1998 they had more than 70 points put on them by the Wallabies on the rightly sainted Jonny Wilkinson’s debut.

The same Woodward, too, who asked people to judge him on the 1999 World Cup where, under the four-team pool format in place then, they failed to qualify automatically for the quarter-finals, scraped through a play-off against play-off then were duly dumped unceremoniously out of the tournament by South Africa’s Springboks in those quarter-finals.

Back then English officialdom kept faith with Woodward and after a string of learning experiences as they lost big match after big match, at Wembley in 1999, Murrayfield in 2000, at Lansdowne Road in 2001 and at Stade de France in 2002 as Grand Slam opportunity after Grand Slam opportunity was blown they continued to do so until their annus mirabilis of 2003 when a Grand Slam was followed by a series win in New Zealand and then their World Cup triumph in Sydney.

The noises being made from English rugby’s headquarters were, then, the right ones as Bill Beaumont, the RFU chairman and others seemed to be recognising that they have, in extending his contract to 2020 last year, entrusted a homegrown coach who was inexperienced at the highest level, never having played international rugby, with a youthful group of players who found themselves in a bear pit of a pool up against high class opponents who have major successes on their CVs in Australia and Wales.

There is, then, a lesson to be learned from Woodward’s time in charge but it is not necessarily the simplistic one that only one man can save England.

It is that too often in modern sport the knee-jerk reaction is to punish failure rather than allowing those who have failed the chance to redeem themselves. Lancaster deserves longer in his job, but it will take brave men to defy the clamour for change.