Peter Bills: Please help, we're sinking in a pit of medocrity

Martin Johnson has entered the cruel world of coaching. Photo / Getty Images

In 1939, you sent simple, humble wonderful men - farmers, labourers, workers, whoever - to help save us in our hour of need.

In 2010, I send tonight this heartfelt message - please send some men to save our rugby.

The state of the game in the UK - and especially in England - is dire. Just as the Australians sent us a brilliant bowling coach a year or two before an Ashes series, so we could get back on our feet and record a famous triumph, so we need New Zealanders to rescue our rugby.

English rugby is in an absolute pit of mediocrity, a dire state just 16 months out from the 2011 World Cup.

The performance England gave in carving out a 15-15 draw against Scotland at Murrayfield served only to underline the extreme poverty in England's game at this time.

It was a shambolic, shameful, appalling performance. We have no idea how to play the game of contemporary times. England are playing a game more resembled to a clash of behemoths.

In the world of English rugby, it is as though Singapore has not yet fallen. Players stand around, kick the leather off the ball, and go nowhere fast. They crunch into opponents and make about a yard and a half each time. It is the rugby of the dinosaurs.

In charge of the national side is the arch dinosaur, Martin Johnson, a forward who played the game at his own pace.

Sure, Johnson was a wondrous, powerful, charismatic player, but alas, the cruel world of coaching has found him out. Great players do not automatically make great coaches, as we are seeing.

England's game at Murrayfield was not dissimilar to the policy of the peasants in Stalinist Russia: namely, how to handle fear, how to survive, how to risk nothing and simply stay alive.

The lack of ambition in their game was cringe-inducing, their accuracy pitiful. They are playing a brand of rugby that went out of fashion years ago.

It was tragic to see Jonny Wilkinson, once one of world rugby's greatest players, trying to direct this utter shambles of a game.

Wilkinson stood 10 metres deep, well out of harm's way and vainly tried to attack the gain line from there. A child could have told him what he was doing wrong.

When he kicked, it was invariably inaccurate and when he was led off, dazed, bruised and battered after an awful collision with his own captain Steve Borthwick, you just wondered whether we had seen the last of a player who guided England to their 2003 World Cup win.

Manifestly, England cannot go on with Wilkinson. He represents the past, not the future.

What is most missing in the England set-up is the freedom of players to go out and play, to express themselves. Their minds are clearly filled with the fear of failure, of self doubt.

No one is willing to take a risk. It is as though they are pre-programmed robots, only able to perform to the technical plan written for them.

How did English rugby, a structure that luxuriates in the advantage of having hundreds of thousands of people playing the game in the country, get into this complete mess?

That's a simple one to answer. Put at the top of the RFU people who know nothing about the game, corporate creatures who talk only of the "brand", not the "team", and you quickly slide into this sludge of atrophy.

There is a lesson here for every rugby playing nation of the world - New Zealand, Australia ... every single one.

The business still makes money - serious money - because the people will pay big prices to go and watch cardboard cut-outs as long as they have England jerseys on them.

But there is no one in the crowd with any judgment, no one willing to stand up alone and cry out that, er, actually, the emperor has no clothes.

The occasion is all, the actual product absolute garbage. As we have seen from this England side already this season, there is a vacuum of quality, a dearth of confidence and innovation.

They are prepared to the nth degree but for what? To trade 10 penalty goals with the strictly limited Scots in a game that was a shocking advertisement for the sport.

One of the lines of the Scottish national anthem talks of England and "proud Edward's army" being sent "homeward tae think again".

If this dreadful, demoralising display by England was insufficient to make them think again, then nothing will.

* Peter Bills is a rugby writer for Independent News & Media in London