Alastair Hignell column: Johnson & Co are safe despite the dreaded backing from the chairman

Alastair Hignell column: Thank God it's not football, or there would be nobody left in a job.

In the round-ball game, it has gone beyond a joke that a vote of confidence is the harbinger of the sack.

Whenever a football chairman is quoted as expressing full confidence in his manager, the latter, so we are led to believe, grits his teeth, scans the jobs pages and waits for his P45.

So, despite England losing two out of three autumn internationals; despite their failure to score more than one try in any of those games; despite the barrage of boos that rang round Twickenham in the one game they did manage to win; despite the widespread criticism of their playing style and coaching methods; despite the frustration of so many former players with what they perceived as a lack of a game-plan, the expressions of trust emanating from Twickenham this week must be taken at face value. This is back-slapping, not back-stabbing.

Martyn Thomas, chairman of the RFU management board, has expressed his utter confidence in England manager Martin Johnson and the man who appointed him, Rob Andrew.

Johnson has defended his senior coaches John Wells (forwards), Brian Smith (attack) and Mike Ford (defence) while absolving his junior coaches, Jon Callard (kicking) and Graham Rowntree (scrummaging) and praising his players.

They, in turn, have contributed to the love-fest by rounding on their former colleagues for perceived disloyalty and by backing their coaches to the hilt. All of which is perfectly understandable – and predictable.

It's difficult enough getting picked to play for England; no player in his right mind is going to jeopardise his chances of staying there by speaking out against those who selected him in the first place and he's certainly not going to run the risk of being judged a bad apple by uttering a word of criticism of those he has to play alongside.

The specialist coaches are similarly bound by an oath of comradeship to both their colleagues and their charges, while to admit to weaknesses or errors would, they feel, call into question the value of the work they do.

And, anyway, in this era of macro-coaching and statistics, it is relatively easy to convince themselves that because England have won x line-outs, carried the ball y times and crossed the game-line z times, or performed well against another artificial benchmarks, that they are doing a good job and their charges are making progress.

Johnson, it appears, is equally taken in. He'll shrug off charges of misguided loyalty – that both Wells and Rowntree were long-time team-mates of his at Leicester – and point at the record-books. Wells has an enviable record as a club coach while Rowntree was highly rated for his work with the Lions this summer.

And, in treating damning statistics – such as the research that shows England to have managed just six second-half points in their last five matches against southern hemisphere opposition – as unfortunate, he'll reject stories of fundamental philosophical differences among his coaching staff as idle and ill-informed gossip.

And Thomas dare not doubt his manager. He backed the campaign to get rid of Brian Ashton and replace him with a man who may have won the World Cup as a player and a captain but had next to no experience as a manager and a coach. He' s not going to turn on Johnson now.

And he's unlikely to go down the route suggested by members of the rugby press.

They, it is true, know that knocking stories are far easier to write than supportive ones, and they sell more papers.

But they also know it is their job to report what they see and reflect the public response to it. The solutions they come up with are not borne out of any antipathy towards Johnson but rather out of an intense frustration with the way in which Johnson's teams are under-achieving.

So it's unlikely that this week's England briefing will see the unveiling of either Ian McGeechan or Sir Clive Woodward.

There's no chance of Andy Robinson being prepared to abandon a Scotland team he's just coached to victory over Australia, and no chance of Sean Edwards turning his back on Wales.

Expect, then , a repeat of the dreaded vote of confidence. But don't expect England to "do a Wigan". There's absolutely no chance of Steve Borthwick and Co offering to refund their supporters for letting them down. After all, this isn't football.