In truth, while dejection is an understandable reaction to the opening two weekends’ combat, the doom’n’gloom has been wildly overstated, and knee-jerk reactions of the ‘Schmidt Must Go’ variety deserve nothing but scorn. The margins are tiny: two games thus far, one drawn, the other lost by a point. In Paris too, where 40-0 eviscerations used to be more or less the norm. You could view it as a measure of how far we’ve come: there was a time when leading Les Bleus in their own backyard for an hour before succumbing by a nose-hair would have been greeted as a feat of great heroism.

You may feel I am overdoing the Glass Half Full psychology – but these things are rarely as black-and-white as they appear, in a world where we judge every match according to its outcome. It’s only three years since we imploded in what turned out to be Declan Kidney’s final campaign, only avoiding the Wooden Spoon on points-differential. The Golden Generation was aging before our eyes, and the talk was of the End of an Era. Twelve months later, we were dancing around the Stade de France as champions. The leadership void left by Messrs O’Driscoll and O’Connell may not be easily filled overnight, but we’ve a pretty healthy panel, have had horrendous misfortune this season with injuries, continue to be very dogged in defense (the 43-point World Cup meltdown against Argentina notwithstanding) and have hardly become fit for the knacker’s yard overnight.

Obviously we will need a ridiculously fortunate sequence of events to hold onto the Championship, but with games against Italy and Scotland to come, as well as an England side which limped out of its own World Cup in the first round only four months ago, it isn’t exactly insane to speculate that things may look much brighter in a few weeks’ time.