"Unhappy the land that has no heroes," the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote. "No, unhappy the land that is in need of heroes."
Which, perhaps, explains the media attention distastefully and desperately lavished this week on Danny Cipriani as the Wasps' outside-half prepared to return to action five months after suffering a serious injury against Bath, the opponents on Wednesday night. Amid all the huffing, it needed to be pointed out that this was a player yet to turn 21 who had made only one start at international level.
The wretched, pathetic cult of the celebrity has been taken so far it is as if there is no turning back. As David Beckham fades so Theo Walcott faces a transfer of hype, and as Jonny Wilkinson battles against anno domini and the recurrent menace of injuries, so Cipriani hogs headlines, and not just on the sports pages.
If Wilkinson is similar to Walcott in terms of character and relative discomfort in the limelight, so Cipriani revels in, and exploits, media interest in the manner of Beckham. Dropped from the England squad before the game in Scotland last year after being photographed coming out of a nightclub past midnight, Cipriani has not often been out of the news pages since.
With Wilkinson ruled out for three months after dislocating his knee this week, the night before Cipriani made his comeback, the hole he has left in the England squad will not leave the national selectors in a panic, as long as Cipriani resumes his club career where he left off.
What has happened to Wilkinson and Cipriani this week sums up the task facing the England team manager Martin Johnson as he prepares for the November internationals. Very few of the squad which won the 2003 World Cup under Johnson's captaincy will play international rugby again, but as England have lost layers of experience the reinforcements have tended to be ingénues.
England have a squad glittering in potential but, as Arsenal have again found out this season, youth brings with it inconsistency as they grapple with problems and demands they have not previously experienced. Cipriani is no exception: he may have innate ability and a supreme confidence in himself, but until he has proved himself game after game at international level, as Wilkinson did, it is not only disproportionate but also unfair on the player to treat him as a returning hero.
Johnson will be left wondering what happened to a lost generation of players. Rob Andrew may have blamed Sir Clive Woodward for the shambles which quickly followed the 2003 World Cup, but the bottom line is that when the likes of Johnson himself, Neil Back, Matt Dawson, Trevor Woodman, Will Greenwood, Steve Thompson, Jason Robinson and Lawrence Dallaglio retired from international rugby, there were few ready-made replacements; the same went for Mike Tindall, Wilkinson, Phil Vickery and Richard Hill when they suffered long-term injuries. That was not the fault of the national head coach.
The boat-loads of overseas players which docked in the Premiership from the start of the decade may have contributed to the problem, but England had so many staples in their first-choice side, understudies had few opportunities and international rugby largely passed them by.
Johnson has to build again rather than, like Andy Robinson and Brian Ashton before him, try to hold up the ceiling. It will take time and it was a brave call to cast the likes of Tindall, Ben Kay and Joe Worsley into the Saxons with so little experience to call on anyway. Lows will follow highs and vice versa.
Andrew's job is to ensure that the pipeline into the England squad does not suffer a blockage, unlike pre-2003. When Dawson and Kyran Bracken retired a couple of years ago, where were the scrum-halves in their mid-20s? England lost Thompson and ended up with an older hooker in Mark Regan, while Martin Corry was not much younger than Hill.
Johnson at least has until 2011 to deliver and he will not be subject to frequent reviews. Who would dare to anyway? His kids will be given time to grow. As Brecht also wrote: "Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good."
