It was born under a bad sign - the stars were out of alignment from the start, thanks to the despicable, hole-in-the-corner way the Twickenham hierarchy behaved in ending Brian Ashton's tenure as the head coach of the England rugby team -and it ended in a black hole of the governing body's own making.
Martin Johnson, betrayed by some of his best-known players and befuddled by the demands of running a major international sporting concern without a scintilla of relevant experience on which to draw, knew there was only one sensible decision to make, and he made it yesterday. If only his decision-making had always been so clear-minded, so decisive, so right.
For a little over three and a half years, the finest red-rose player of the post-war era - a man who led two Lions tours, captained his country to a world title, emerged from his many tussles with the All Blacks honours even and won every available domestic club trophy (most of them more than once) - attempted to deliver what his supporters on the Rugby Football Union, most notably the long-serving chairman Martyn Thomas, blithely assumed was in his gift: concrete success based on something rather less tangible, namely the aura that had underpinned his perfectly reasonable claim to be judged among the greatest of modern lock forwards. What Johnson did on the pitch, he could replicate in the dressing room. So went the theory.
The theory was wrong. More than that, it was infantile - the product of grown-up minds bent out of shape by childish assumptions that had no grounding in sporting logic or sporting history. Johnson had never coached anyone, managed anyone, organised a training schedule or picked a side, yet Thomas, recently stripped of every last one of his many Twickenham roles, was among those who convinced themselves that none of this mattered. At some point during a fraught and fractious 2008 Six Nations, Johnson joined them by convincing himself. A few weeks before, he had publicly stated that he would "not be so arrogant'' as to imagine he could start a new kind of rugby career at the very top. Another if only...
Where did it go wrong? It would save time to ask if any of it went right. England struggled horribly in early stages of the regime - heavy defeats by southern hemisphere opposition in the autumn of '08 was followed by a Six Nation campaign that was half-cocked at best - and throughout, there were mutterings from players about the joylessness of the red-rose gatherings, the narrowness of the management team's approach to strategy and tactics, the prehistoric nature of training.