Martin Johnson: When Clive went, the RFU was run as a business

Martin Johnson is not a betting man, but if he were he would probably put his shirt – and shirts don't come much bigger – on New Zealand to win the World Cup. That doesn't seem to be a particularly hard admission for the victorious England captain four years ago to make, but he does throw in a few caveats. "I say to people who think it's a conclusion, 'shall we just give them the trophy now, then? Or shall we play the tournament first?'"

Nonetheless, Johnson scoffs at the notion that the All Blacks might have peaked too early. "That's the same stuff they were saying about us four years ago. What are you going to do, not play good rugby because there's a World Cup in two years' time? The rugby they played against the Lions in '05 was some of the best Test rugby I've seen. I've seen teams make more mistakes training against no one. But there's still immense pressure on them, and they're not infallible. Their lineout is not the strongest, and if Richie McCaw can be taken out of the game in and around the breakdown..."

Which is an "if" the size of Johnno himself. And it still leaves Dan Carter and 13 others to wreak havoc. "Yes, I hope they get some competitive pool games. It's possible that Scotland and Italy will save their firepower for each other. But imagine if [as winners of Pool C] they meet Ireland [as Pool D runners-up] in Cardiff? That will be a special place to be."

Johnson articulates these thoughts in his usual flat, unemotional way, and yet his dark eyes glitter at the prospect of a New Zealand v Ireland quarter-final. He is almost as excited by the thought of Friday's curtain-raiser between France and Argentina. "I don't mean this to sound patronising, but Argentina actually go into the tournament with a bit of expectation. [Juan Martin] Hernandez, the full-back from Stade [Francais], is a fantastic player, one of the players I'm really looking forward to watching. So France v Argentina on opening day could be very interesting. The Argentinians are very happy not to make the game pretty, and that might not suit the French. I can imagine the crowd getting on their backs quite quickly."

So much for the other contenders, but what of the defending champions? Here's a real tester for Johnson's imagination: can he imagine Phil Vickery doing what he did in Sydney in 2003, holding the Webb Ellis Trophy aloft as England captain?

Silence. "Erm," he says, after a while. Silence again. We are in a photographic studio in the East End of London, where he has to fulfil one of the commercial obligations that have become his life away from rugby, but even as an "outsider" he is aware that he of all people cannot pronounce on England's chances without thought for the consequences.

"Last year in the soccer," he says carefully, "the England players were talking in March and April about winning the World Cup. They forgot the old cliché about one game at a time. There is only one game in which you can win a World Cup, and that's the final. To get there, England will need to cut out basic, unforced errors. They need to find their best team, and that team needs to be able to play in more than one way, changing things on the field if necessary. If they can get to that point, they have a chance. If they reach the quarter-final, it will probably be Wales, maybe Australia. Neither of those are unbeatable. Then you're in there with a real chance, aren't you? It's the semi-, a one-off game, and with the momentum of a few wins behind them..."

Johnson smiles; always a welcome sight. "I was in south-west France recently and they were saying to me down there that they haven't got a clue what England are going to do. That's a bit scary, but it's true. They have got good players and the intensity of the game against South Africa should be through the roof, but I don't want them looking around at each other thinking 'who am I with here?' How many players have played for England over the last three years? Young, talented guys like Mathew Tait have come in and dropped out, because it's so much harder to get established in a team that's struggling. I remember the exact date that Josh Lewsey got into the England team because it was the day my daughter was born – 9 March 2003. By the June people had forgotten he'd only been in the team for two or three months. It seemed like he'd been there forever. That doesn't happen in a struggling team."

Four years ago, the prospect of an unsettled, struggling England team was remote indeed. It was a steady, formidable unit, led on to the field by the steadiest, most formidable player of them all. I ask Johnson whether he could have conceived, as his roar split the Sydney night air on 22 November 2003, that next time round the most generous price on the champions to retain the trophy would be 28-1?

"Well, I remember soon afterwards wondering who might be around for the next one, and I came up with nine or 10. The front row were young enough, Benny Kay had a chance, then there was Hilly [Richard Hill], Jonny [Wilkinson], Mike Tindall, Jason [Robinson], Josh and Ben [Cohen]. I didn't even count Lawrence. As it is, I think there are seven of them out there, but that's more by chance than long-term planning.

"The tour [to New Zealand] in summer '04 was the big mistake. It was crazy. We'd been playing non-stop since the previous June and there are some guys who have never really recovered from that tour. When you think about the Lions tour in '05, who of the England players who'd played in the World Cup was still on form? Josh maybe, and that's about it."

Maybe the players should have declared themselves unavailable for the misguided 2004 tour, I venture, just as Johnson's erstwhile team-mate at Leicester, Julian White, has done for the World Cup. Is he disappointed in White? "I'm disappointed that there is a good player not available. But Julian has a farm to manage, he's a new dad, and if there's a compelling reason a player wants to be at home, he's not going to be any good to you away. He's always been his own man, Julian, and if he thinks he will be miserable or distracted then he's right not to do it."

At first, Johnson seems similarly diplomatic when I ask whether he lays the blame for England's decline squarely at the feet of the Rugby Football Union? "I don't want to talk about blame," he says, before doing just that. "But taking the guys on tour in '04 showed a complete lack of foresight. When Clive [Woodward] went, the chief executive was Francis Barron. He's not from a rugby background, is he? The performance director was Chris Spice, who's from a hockey background. The RFU was run as a business, fine, but no one was looking at the bigger picture from a rugby point of view. No one was saying, 'who's the next group of coaches?' Because the coaches, like the players, had hit their peak. When Clive went, it would have been good to have a fresh start."

Meaning that the RFU appointed the wrong man in Andy Robinson, Woodward's lieutenant? A glimmer of a smile. "I felt sorry for Andy. The first game he wasn't there, Jonny was available for the first time in ages, and of course Andy said [in this newspaper, as it happens] that he probably wouldn't have picked him. What happens? Jonny scores 30 points or whatever. The thing about Andy is that he wasn't suited to being head coach like Clive. He's more of a straight rugby coach, which is fine, but he did make mistakes. Taking Martin [Corry] as captain off and putting Lawrence [Dallaglio] on, even if it was tactically the right decision, invited a media frenzy as much as you ever get a media frenzy in rugby. It became an issue the whole team had to deal with."

Did Johnson's heart leap when Brian Ashton was made coach? He laughs. "It takes more than a rugby coach to make my heart leap."

If the people had been able to vote in a new coach, I suggest, Johnson would right now be nibbling on a croissant planning the strategy for the game against the USA. "Yeah, I know. I remember being at Twickenham not long after I retired, and people stopping me saying, 'why aren't you in there with the boys?' I said 'because I've retired.' And they said 'yeah, but you should be in there!' Can you imagine starting a new job and having the guy who used to do it looking over your shoulder all the time?"

As for the idea of him coaching England, or Leicester, or anyone else, the great man makes the pertinent point that he might be rubbish. "You can be good at captaincy but coaching is different, frustrating. You can't go out there and play. People think I'd be good, but you've got to have huge passion to do it. I finished in May '05 and if I'd wanted to coach I'd have started the next day. I didn't want to do that."

Is there, somewhere at the back of his mind, the niggling worry that if he were to flop as a coach it might cloud his legacy as a player? After all, he cited soccer, and it is the lot of several 1966 World Cup winners to be remembered as great players but miserably unsuccessful managers, including his counterpart as captain, Bobby Moore.

"Yeah, but when people say that I got out out at the right time as a player, they're missing the point. I wasn't afraid to play in an unsuccessful team, and I'm not afraid of coaching one. If I want to get into it, I will do. But people love the mythology of sport. They like to think their sporting heroes are special. We're not. A load of us played cricket the other week and there were people saying, 'God, you're normal, aren't you?'"

In the meantime, what does he find away from the rugby field that gives him the same fulfilment? "I haven't really found it yet. People always talk about the big international games, but it's the difficult Leicester games away from home, winning in front of a hostile crowd, that I remember as fondly as any. On the other hand, if we lost a game with Leicester, there'd be a whole week of soul-searching before we got the chance to put it right. I don't miss the anxiety of that."

I debate whether to ask him when he last searched his soul, but decide not to. Even in his playing days I found Johnson an amenable interviewee, and he is doubly so now, but the famous glower still discourages impertinent questions. Instead, we wander outside to the street, where my colleague David Ashdown takes his picture and Johnson talks about his growing enthusiasm for cycling. On his holiday, he says, he cycled part of the Tour de France course, downhill, at considerable speed. If England can find the same frightening momentum, the trophy is in the bag.

Martin Johnson is official ambassador for Tetley's Bitter

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