England let victory 'slip away', says Johnson

A question: is it really legitimate for an England team to feel semi-satisfied and almost wholly relieved at going down by eight points in Cardiff, on the basis that most people expected them to lose by twice that amount, if not three times?

To a member of the 1970s vintage – the fine flanker Tony Neary, for instance, who made four trips across the bridge during that dolorous decade and was splattered all over the Welsh capital on each occasion – the answer would be a resounding "yes". If, like the current red-rose manager, you played in an era when defeat there seemed barely possible, let alone likely, the reaction might be different.

As indeed it was. Martin Johnson, the great Leicester lock who finished his career without a stain on his Cardiff record (as opposed to his disciplinary one), was not of a mind on Saturday night to "take the positives" from an improved performance. "I'm not into moral victories and all that rubbish," he remarked. "As I've said to the players, these are special games and they won't play that many of them. They've just let one slip away."

He was exaggerating just a little. England were certainly competitive against the reigning Six Nations champions and favourites for this year's title, but they were competitive in a ferociously committed, heart-and-soul kind of way: a little like Italy when they are performing at their optimum. When they tackled, they did it with meaning: Joe Worsley, handed a specific task and ordered to play within tight parameters, operated so effectively that he walked away with the man of the match shampoo; Harry Ellis, Lee Mears and the much-maligned captain, Steve Borthwick, were every bit as resolute in defence. Yet the visitors seldom seemed in danger of actually winning the game, although Toby Flood might have given the Welshmen a nasty dose of the heebie-jeebies had he taken an opportunity to narrow the gap to five points four minutes from the end.

The hosts were more comfortable on the ball, just as they were more comfortable in their own collective skin, and while they lost the try count by the odd score in three – England, so short of invention these past months, conjured two five-pointers from the nothingness of the night sky courtesy of an inspired inside pass from the wide-roaming Mark Cueto and a sharp piece of opportunism from Delon Armitage – there was no suggestion of alarm, let alone panic, as the visitors chipped away at a 12-point deficit in the third quarter. Territorially, Wales won the first half hands down and shaded the second, a sure sign that the tactical kicking game went the way of the men in red. They also stayed on the right side of the referee, Jonathan Kaplan, to the extent that they gave their opponents only two penalty shots at the sticks, one of them from the back end of beyond.

Kaplan exerted quite an influence on proceedings, which said as much about him as it did about the players. Johnson was spitting spiders over some of the decisions that went against his side, not least those that resulted in Mike Tindall and Andy Goode serving time in the sin bin – periods of penance during which Wales accumulated all but nine of their points. "I'm not bitching about it," the manager said, through gritted teeth, "but there's a perception about us at the moment, it is becoming self-perpetuating and we have to end it by being whiter than white." In other words, officials have it in for England, and will continue to have it in for them unless they start behaving like saints and angels, rather than rugby players.

Eight yellow cards in three matches is going it a bit, even by Johnson's standards, but on this occasion, neither case was of the open-and-shut variety. Both midfielders were sent packing for slowing Welsh ball on the floor, Tindall at a ruck on the 22 and Goode within a few feet of his own line. The former was befuddled by Kaplan's decision, the latter distraught; indeed, the outside-half from Brive looked close to suicidal when, two minutes after taking his seat in the cooler, Leigh Halfpenny set sail for an overlap try down England's exposed right flank. However, second and third showings of the offence suggested that whatever Goode was doing at that fateful breakdown, he was at least doing it on his feet. Kaplan may or may not have been wrong in law, but he was certainly mean in spirit.

"Jonathan and I met on Friday and he said: 'I've reffed you before and it's all good,'" Johnson reported. One of those previous occasions was in Dublin three years ago, when Ireland won a tight game in contentious circumstances and Andy Robinson, then England's head coach, went public with his misgivings on the Kaplan front. Robinson remembers the incident to this day, not least because he was given a dressing-down for speaking out of turn. At a guess, Kaplan probably remembers too.

The burning intensity of England's performance here will lower the critical heat at home for a week or so, as indeed it should, but it is too much to expect Borthwick's pen-wielding assassins to give credit where it is due. The captain spared nothing of himself at the weekend, scrummaging strongly and shading the line-out contest while ensuring that Andy Powell, the powerful Welsh No 8, was neutralised. Time and again, he brought Powell to earth, denying the Welsh forwards the momentum they had grown accustomed to generating. It was by some distance his finest performance since accepting the captaincy.

"I feel good in my game," he insisted when asked whether the constant carping had undermined his confidence. "People will say all sorts about me, but I live by certain values and the principal one is honesty. If I'm to be known as anything, I want to be known as an honest player. Someone very close to me rang on Friday and said, 'Just keep doing what you're doing, as well as you possibly can', which was what I needed to hear. It's always about the team, never about Steve Borthwick. I suspect that's been to my detriment at times, but selfishness is not what I'm about."

It is still difficult to establish precisely what England are about, for all Worsley's destructive prowess – "He's a big-game player and as soon as I saw he'd been named in the team I knew all the talk of an easy victory would be a million miles from the truth," said Shaun Edwards, the Wales defence coach who works with the Englishman at Wasps – and the "this far and no further" spirit running through the veins of the entire side, from one to 15. An honourable failure against opponents they would have expected to defeat a year ago is not the stuff of dreams.

Next up are the Irish, at Croke Park – a dark place for England, in rugby terms as well as historical ones. How much light this effort has shone into the impenetrable corners of Team Johnson will become clear after that fixture is completed, and not before.

Wales: L Byrne (Ospreys); L Halfpenny (Cardiff Blues), T Shanklin (Cardiff Blues), J Roberts (Cardiff Blues), M Jones (Scarlets); S Jones (Scarlets), M Phillips (Ospreys); G Jenkins (Cardiff Blues), M Rees (Scarlets), A Jones (Ospreys), I Gough (Ospreys), A-W Jones (Ospreys), R Jones (Ospreys, capt), M Williams (Cardiff Blues), A Powell (Cardiff Blues). Replacements: D Jones (Scarlets) for Powell, 60; H Bennett (Ospreys) for Rees, 67; D Peel (Sale) for Phillips, 74.

England: D Armitage (London Irish); P Sackey (Wasps), M Tindall (Gloucester), R Flutey (Wasps), M Cueto (Sale); A Goode (Brive), H Ellis (Leicester); A Sheridan (Sale), L Mears (Bath), P Vickery (Wasps), S Borthwick (Saracens, capt), N Kennedy (London Irish), J Haskell (Wasps), J Worsley (Wasps), N Easter (Harlequins). Replacements: T Flood (Leicester) for Goode 51; T Croft (Leicester) for Kennedy 53; M Tait (Sale) for Sackey 65; D Hartley (Northampton) for Mears 65; J White (Leicester) for Vickery 65; L Narraway (Gloucester) for Haskell 65.

Referee: J Kaplan (South Africa).