England sparkle in Cardiff, but can't convert flair into victory

Wales won the match, England won the try count, the penalty count and the yellow-card count. They also won back a huge amount of respect. But who won the mind-games?

So much is written and said in the build-up to a big international these days that it's now obligatory to record the sayings not just of the participants but also of just about everyone who has ever featured in the fixture in the past and just about everyone who might have a role to play in the present.

Welsh coach Warren Gatland, for instance , was widely quoted as saying – and not in a complimentary way – that watching England was like watching the Leicester teams of old.

His declaration that "we think there is an obligation in professional sport to entertain a little bit" was interpreted as a dig at England's professed desire to win at all costs.

The implication of course was that while Leicester may have been hugely successful – and with Gatland's opposite number Martin Johnson as captain, the Tigers had won just about every honour open to them – they were essentially, dull, boring, and negative.

England, according to pre-match pontifications that appeared to be given weight by the selection of the essentially destructive Joe Worsley – were going to be every bit as worthy, while Wales, even without the defence-shredding Shane Williams, were going to be creative, entertaining and positive.

Yet as England scored more tries than Wales, both of them superbly executed by players showing bucketloads of skill, speed and flair, and Wales kept ahead through a steady, disciplined, pragmatic (Leicester-like?) accumulation of points through the boot of Stephen Jones, the rune-readers were left to wonder whether Gatland's remarks had been more effective as a goad to England than as a spur to his own team.

And England's display at the Millenium Stadium also left us wondering whether attack coach Brian Smith's apparently asinine remarks of the previous week were actually gems of reverse psychology.

Smith had attempted to soften criticism of England's leaden-footed display against Italy the previous week by suggesting that his players were "spooked" by the noise at Twickenham. What, we wondered , would the tender little flowers make of the cacophony engendered by a Cardiff crowd baying for English blood?

They must have wondered the same thing, and they evidently concluded – especially once Martin Johnson had insisted that the roof stay shut and the din allowed to escape – that if their worst imaginings would not necessarily be realized off the pitch, there was no reason they should be realized on it.

But that didn't stop England conceding penalties, or gaining yellow-cards, and here again they may have been the victim of their own utterances. The statistics do not lie; England had nine players sent to the sin-bin in their previous six matches.

But they highlighted the problem with repeated declarations on the need to tighten up their discipline,

England may just have sowed a seed in the mind of referee Jonathan Kaplan; subconsciously, he may have been convinced that England were persistent offenders, and in that grey, difficult-to-police tackle area, much more likely to commit offences.

It certainly seemed that way to Martin Johnson, and maybe his latest remarks are designed to correct the imbalance. Now he's talking about a "perception issue" surrounding his team and implying that referees seem to believe that if any team is liable to offend at the breakdown, it is England.

Deconstructionists will note the change of language; Johnson is no longer saying that England need to be more 'disciplined', possibly because he knows, and referees know, that the adjective could be applied to a player who would deliberately give away a penalty rather than allow a chance of a try.

In demanding that his players be "whiter than white", Johnson is suggesting that England's players should be considered blameless till found guilty, and maybe also alluding to a suspicion, as yet unsupported by statistical data, that the lighter the colour, the more it stands out – particularly in the mind of a referee faced with any number of split second decisions.

That's for another time. For now, Johson's suggesting that the referee for next week's match against Ireland at Croke Park abandons all preconceived notions about England's players, and he's asking his players to "believe they are as good as we know they are", without committing himself to quantifying how good that is.

Whatever it is, they will have to be better still than they were against Wales.

Sparkling in defeat: Delon Armitage, one of England's two try scorers against Wales on Saturday