Haka still rings true as All Blacks sound a hearty warning to Woodward

However sceptical we are about the haka as a timeless statement of warrior intent, it has one supreme redemption. It can live free of the heaviest ridicule only so long as New Zealander rugby players continue to play the game not just with their bodies but also their souls.

This means it can be booked in for at least another 10 years. An empty-handed rugby team has no business flaunting the haka, but though England won they are unlikely to challenge the All Black performing rights.

Certainly the ritual should retain a rather glorious validity long after the pre-match fireworks over a pitch bedecked by a giant flag of St George ceases to be a bad memory.

Though defeated narrowly by their triumphalist hosts – for only the fifth time in 97 years – the young, lightly considered All Blacks gave us thrilling evidence that rugby's greatest tradition is once again stirring with new vitality and brilliance. It was a wonderfully refreshing statement on a superb autumn afternoon when Jonah Lomu, who was supposedly sullenly contemplating the last embers of a played-out volcano, gathered himself into immense new life.

After middle England's version of a Nuremburg rally, the haka seemed less a remnant from more innocent sporting days than an authentic signal from the most rampaging spirit in the game.

Mercifully, it stopped just short of a crushing statement that England's hopes of winning the World Cup are condemned to futility, that however much power they marshal, and however formidable the development of Saturday's match-winner Jonny Wilkinson, the prize will always be one leap of intuition, one surge of natural rugby-playing blood, too far. How short, though, is the tormenting question for the England coach, Clive Woodward, who had read all week that England not only needed to win but win big against the skeleton New Zealand pack.

No doubt he, like most everybody else, had something more than a three-point margin in mind. What he got was outstanding performances from Wilkinson, try-scoring flanker Lewis Moody, the highly-mobile hooker Steve Thompson – and a saving tackle from Ben Cohen which spectacularly reminded a wider sporting world of the defensive security brought to English football's World Cup-winning drive by his uncle George at Wembley in 1966.

These were key contributions to a magnificent match but unfortunately they were not quite enough to banish that old fear that England have become the trial horses of world rugby. Woodward, like the Duke of York, marches them up the hill and down again but that the great prize of the World Cup is likely to remain elusive is something that he may one day have to bleakly accept as a matter of genes as much as failed team development.

It is true the All Black coach, John Mitchell, had put himself in a no-lose situation by leaving his big forward guns at home, but whether or not the result was the product of cunning calculation was not really the point. It was surely enough for him that his backs performed the rugby equivalent of multiplying the loaves and the fishes.

For England, Wilkinson scored a try of tremendous craft and judgement, and helped brilliantly to open the way for Moody. Cohen sprawled, star-shaped, after thundering over the line, and as there has been so many times, there was a pervasive sense of England's ability to inflict power. But, again, it was ultimately not enough to discourage an apprehensive look a little further down the road.

For New Zealand, you have to believe, the prospect was sharply more encouraging. They said on Saturday that they may indeed be the last great little sporting nation. They said it with the bite and the invention of their passing. England moved the ball. New Zealand conjured it. One inside pass from the centre Keith Lowen, as a great white posse converged on him, was a silver bullet decorated with a fern. It was the trademark of a superior bloodline.

Hungarian footballers and Welsh rugby players had it and, for one reason of politics or culture or economy, they let it go. The possibility of such a fate for New Zealand was pushed back, if not utterly expelled, at Twickenham. Carlos Spencer, a half back who for so long has operated on the margins of greatness, did it with the sharpness and snap of his movement and the invention of his passing. Doug Howlett did it with running that was thrilling in its bite and its subtlety. Tana Umaga was an old head and a vibrant force.

The All Blacks snatched at morsels from up front and turned them into a banquet. If Ben Kay had not put in a stupendous jump at a late line-out, and if Cohen had failed to cover the ground so brilliantly to stop Ben Blair at the corner, the second-half tries of Lomu and scrum-half Danny Lee would have been so much more than powerful suggestions of what the future is likely to bring.

They would have been official statements of a dispiriting truth for English rugby. It would have been the one that says that while good rugby teams can be built with the kind of patience and dedication displayed by Woodward over the last few years, great ones tend to happen in the womb. It is anyway, a theory, that New Zealand can place above the one that says that every defeat is a small death. What happened to the All Blacks at Twickenham was, after all, rather more in the way of a christening.