A long journey England are making progress, even if the scoreboard doesn't yet show it

You know it has been a long rugby union season when it feels like it kicked off in a parallel universe.

- Robert Kitson

Was Fin Baxter even born when Steve Borthwick's squad assembled for their first pre-World Cup training camp on 12 June last year? Were those faraway August warm-up Tests some kind of fever dream? No one can accuse England of not having squeezed a huge amount into the past 13 months.

It has been some slog. Sometimes, we can all be guilty of sitting in the stands or on a sofa 12,000 miles away and forgetting sport is played by human beings not robots. So if England did flag slightly in the final quarter against New Zealand, whose fault is that? The weary players, the coaches who keep selecting them regardless, or the ludicrous quart-into-a-pint-pot demands of the global rugby calendar? To some, the answer is largely superfluous.

Test rugby remains a results business and England took a host of players with them to Japan and New Zealand who never actually took the field. Sticking with Maro Itoje, who exceeded the season's supposed maximum player welfare threshold during the first Test, was not contractually essential. You reap what you sow, in this case, a 2-0 series defeat to a distinctly mortal All Black side rebuilding under new management.

But hang on. Cast your mind back not to England's results in the mists of summer 2023 but to the limited gameplan they were pursuing.

To the booing at Twickenham after the loss to Fiji? To the dog days of the World Cup pool stages, when George Ford's drop-goals and a headed "assist" from Joe Marler were almost the zenith of England's attacking ambition.