Boks loom large for toothless England

"The scrum was a disappointing area," said Johnson. "There was no lack of experience and we are a big powerful front row."

To have a chance of exploiting weaknesses in a strangely error-prone South African team - they struggled to a 14-10 win over Scotland - England must bulk up their pack with players capable of making the hard yards.

Simon Shaw and James Haskell must be included if England are to add much needed ballast to their scrum and really punch their weight when it comes to ball carrying.

Johnson pinpointed another failing during the Australia match. Players lost faith in the game plan that had been drummed into them for the last three weeks and confusion resulted. Opportunities to exploit overlaps and mis-matches were not recognised or taken. "It only needs one player to go off plan for five seconds and opportunities are lost in a test match and people need to learn that," said the England boss.

"We need to back ourselves and play to our plan. If it's not working, then we can change it on the pitch, but we have to give it a chance to work. We gave away needless penalties instead of backing our defence.

"The mistakes we made are a little bit inevitable because of inexperience but we picked these players because we back them to do the job. There will be no get-out cards.

"They will bounce back. We won't be the finished article by next Saturday against South Africa, but I think we can learn quickly."

Two blistering breaks by Danny Cipriani showed England had the ability to hurt a quality defence, but the London Wasps No10 was short of support and it was a similar story when centre Riki Flutey found space.

Cipriani said: "If we just tweak some things we will be more effective next time. They had real team unity and it's something we need to make the most of - our breaks.

"We need to stick to our plan. We did go off it at times but it's not a question of lack of effort. We should have used our back three players more but this is only our second game together and it is a massive learning curve."

It was left to former captain Phil Vickery to set out exactly what is needed against South Africa and he took the scrum problems personally. "The fact is we struggled," he explained. "We have to take it on the chin, look at ourselves and learn from it.

"There is no more physical game in rugby than facing the Springboks and they will have seen what happened against Australia and be full of confidence. We cannot use the fact we are a new team as an excuse - being beaten at home by 14 points is unacceptable."