Take your pick of the best and most experienced rugby coaches around: Steve Hansen, Wayne Smith, Warren Gatland, or even Eddie Jones. With the current structure of rugby in England, not one of them could make the changes necessary to get the team performing to the potential of the biggest rugby nation in the world.

If – or when – the review panel the Rugby Football Union has convened to rake over England’s limp World Cup performance decides Stuart Lancaster has to go, whoever replaces him as head coach will have one hand tied behind his back because the structure of the professional game in this country means he cannot fully influence it.

To be honest, I have little confidence in the review finding any useful answers. I’m not confident in the people carrying out the review and even if they decide on a new coach, I’m no more confident in the people who will make the appointment because they will be the people who have appointed the past two coaches, Martin Johnson and Lancaster, neither of whom has been qualified for the job.

Neither had enough experience of coaching before getting the top job in the biggest union in the world, but you can’t blame them for that – blame the people who appointed them. And even if they had the necessary experience, they would still have been doing the job with one hand tied behind their backs. Even if they do get the right man this time, whoever it is will also be in no position to impose his ideas properly.

The head coach sits at the top of the whole game in England but has authority only over player selection and a few weeks’ training per year. The rest of the time the players are at their clubs, who are totally independent of the RFU and whose interests are totally different to those of the England team. Among the top tier nations, only England and France have that structure and the two are currently the biggest failures around. We need to try to find a structure that aligns at least some of the interests of the clubs and the international side if England are to have a chance of fulfilling their potential.

England’s past few coaching appointments have been poor so that without changing anything else, we could be more successful with better coaching. But even then, if you sat down strategically and said: “What do we need to change and influence between now and the next World Cup in four years?” you would only be able to do that in the international windows, whereas in New Zealand you influence them from the Super 15 down to the Under-20s.

That is always going to put us behind. A good coach will select better and organise better but his level of influence is still behind that of the coaches at the other unions.

This is not a criticism of the clubs. They do a lot of good work, but it is not aligned. It’s like running a business with 13 departments working against each other. Look at the case of Sam Burgess: Bath will not play him in the centre because they do not have time for him to learn there even though in a year he might be the best man for the position. But the only way he will become that is by playing and learning. Yet England play him at centre anyway, even though he cannot get a game there for his club.

I believe we need something like a non-executive board, independent of the clubs and the union, to have a strong say in where the game is going. At the moment we have one coach speaking for the union and 12 businesses who are only interested in making sure they are successful or avoid relegation. The Professional Game Board performs some of this function in theory but it has no teeth and no influence over the actual game.

There has to be some sort of non-executive body. Some sort of brains trust that sits across the union and the clubs and supports the strategic development of the game in this country. Sadly, I don’t think the clubs would agree to it.

The problem is that none of us has the answer. It is clear that it is unfair in the current system to put one person in and to expect them to be successful and to change things, but what is far less clear is how to get the clubs and the union to agree to change that system.