Plenty of people are looking at how the All Blacks are playing - not to mention the way the Springboks have added a sprinkling of panache to their power game - and conclude that England cannot win their home World Cup next year without a miracle. Maybe two miracles.
One of them is supposed to be athletic performance head Matt Parker, who English rugby hopes will give them an edge. Formerly a miracle worker as director of marginal gains for Britain's triumphant cycling team in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, he does not believe in the paranormal.
He believes the red-rose squad has improved enough that recapturing the Webb Ellis Trophy is possible.
It is a year since Parker joined England rugby from the Olympic cycling set-up and his ideas are beginning to take shape. As head of a 16-man high-performance team boasting experts in a range of disciplines, from medicine and psychology to nutrition and analysis, he has a detailed plan running to the start of the tournament in a little under 20 months.
The 38-year-old rarely puts his head above the parapet and when he does, he prefers to keep his brightest ideas to himself. "People ask me what I do," he says. "What I don't do is look for magic formulas, because there aren't any. It's not often that anyone working in this field finds one thing capable of giving you that 10-15 per cent improvement in performance. Dick Fosbury did it in the high jump back in '68; McLaren did it in motor racing. But it's very rare. If you just search for the big leap forward, the silver bullet, it's easy to miss the important day-to-day detail.
