WHAT a painful few days.

I hope I’m wrong, but I fear England’s World Cup failure may have set the sport back five years this country.

You can only imagine how inspiring it would have been had they reached the knockout stages.

It’s a crying shame, because the global game has never looked stronger. It really has been a fantastic tournament to date and I hope it will continue to be Instead, we’re left to reflect on what might have been and a deep inquest into what went wrong.

England have got the biggest playing pool of all and the financial muscle - I wouldn’t have been surprised if £5-10 million was spent getting the team ready for this competition.

But now, something has to happen. Given what’s taken place, I can’t see how Stuart Lancaster can carry on.

There are a lot of things to look at but one of the biggest aspects for me is the way they set things up one way before the tournament, then seemed to go somewhere else.

It’s the inconsistency that will irk many. There was a centre partnership that put 55 points on France (in the Six Nations), yet one of the casualties at the squad announcement was one of them, Luther Burrell.

Then you have the George Ford situation. There were just so many strange decisions. How was there no clarity after four years?

Look at Australia and what coach Michael Cheika has done in just a year. He is a big personality, knew what he wanted - to get Matt Giteau, who had been playing in Europe, into his team - and he made it happen.

Contrast that with England, where we had all the hullabaloo over Stefan Armitage’s non-inclusion in the England squad.

So what next? Well, in my opinion, this is not something that can be done quickly. You have to scour the world for the best people and you have got to look for people who have been there and done it.

Stuart Lancaster is a decent man, but you don’t want to see somebody going through what he did. It seemed his coaching team were lacking the experience of winning, that other teams have.