IT WAS hard not to feel some sympathy for Martin Johnson as he sat alone at a makeshift top table in the Cargill Room of Dunedin’s Southern Cross Hotel. “Did he cheat on his wife?” shouted a reporter from a New Zealand TV station, clearly not bothered about Georgia’s back row. In his playing days, the former England captain would have quietly sorted out the miscreant at the next ruck. Trapped inside a packed conference suite, with cameras and microphones everywhere, the etiquette is slightly different.

All Johnson could do was to keep repeating himself, a castaway clinging to the same old piece of driftwood. What a sad world we live in, he kept saying, if rugby players can’t pop out for a beer occasionally. His lofty five-word verdict – “Rugby player drinks beer. Shocker.” – would have worked in certain circumstances. There was just one small problem – or, to be precise, a bar full of them.

England’s boozy night at a low-rent dwarf-racing venue in Queenstown may have launched a million jokes but, lest we forget, this is a World Cup. For the Red Rose management, as a result, these are suddenly defining days.

Because even when you strip away the latest distractions – the grainy CCTV footage of Mike Tindall and an alleged female admirer, the embarrassing Facebook pictures and, last but not least, the dwarves themselves – you cannot help feeling England’s World Cup campaign is close to the edge. They will, presumably, beat Georgia tomorrow but it has been a grim week. One leading forward (Courtney Lawes) banned for a fortnight, another (Andrew Sheridan) injured and out of the tournament, their stand-in captain (Mike Tindall) hung out to dry on the front page of the Sun. For a side supposed to be chilling out away from the limelight, it is some list.

Worst of all, the judgment of certain players and management figures grows ever more questionable. What were those players thinking as they wrestled drunkenly on the sofa and partied with their vertically challenged new friends? What was Johnson thinking – “I thought it was a good idea,” he said – when he waved them off for the night without firmly reminding them of their responsibilities? Why has he not acknowledged it was a poor call by all concerned? It is as if none of them have fully appreciated what a World Cup in New Zealand entails. Even when they visit the lavatory, the chances are someone will ask a rugby-related question. Nor is there any hiding place when it comes to camera phones.

“I’ve had my arms around 50 women in Queenstown aged from seven months to 77,” muttered Johnson, trying to introduce a measure of humour into the rather grim proceedings. “Everyone wants to get a piece of you. But we either lock ourselves away and don’t talk to anyone, or we try and enjoy the experience at the right time, in the right place and in the right way.”

Eminently sensible words, six days too late. Within moments, though, Johnson could be heard insisting rugby’s off-field behavioural standards are not comparable to those which prevail in football. “If I have to get to the point where I have to say: ‘We can’t go out, we can’t do this or that,’ it’s a pretty sad world, isn’t it?” he said again. “That’s not a world I want to be involved in. You talk about football but I’d much rather be at this event with the atmosphere we’ve got around it.”

It is a defiantly old-school argument and it is a dangerously naive one. England are not on an Easter tour or a gap year. This is professional sport, yet Johnson still seems to regard this week’s furore as the media’s fault.

Few around him are inclined to question the big man. This has its knock-on effects for Team England, on and off the field. From a PR perspective, the strategy has long been to keep the media in the dark as far as possible. Under Johnson, that relationship has gradually worsened. Team announcements are withheld so as not to assist opponents, only for the XV to be routinely leaked by the players themselves.

Should England lose to Scotland in a fortnight, or even bow out in the quarter-finals without showing much save honest commitment, the events of the past week may come back to roost.