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.
"I have no rugby background - my sporting interest initially was track and field, with a bit of football thrown in - but equally, I came into this group with no preconceptions. It was a challenge I felt I couldn't turn down because you don't get many opportunities to be involved in something as big as a home World Cup.
"The pursuit of high performance is relentless," he says, "and if we want to be smarter and faster than the opposition, we'll have to work for it. That's why I'm here."
- The Independent