"I'm not into moral victories and all that rubbish," Martin Johnson announced as he sat in front of the assembled press. Johnson clearly considered this a game that England could have, and indeed should have, won.

"I believe we had a chance and we let it slip," he continued, "As we said to each other beforehand these are special games. They only come around every two years and you don't get many of them. And we let this one slip."

"It was a Test match we should have won," he repeated, "despite the penalty count and our yellow cards." Johnson made no excuses. "I'm not bitching about that," he replied when asked about Delon Armitage being tackled while in the air. "These are just the things you have to overcome to win Test matches." The same applied to the sin-binning of Mike Tindall and Andy Goode, though Johnson did at least concede that he found Tindall's sin-binning the more puzzling of the two.

He also suggested that England's yellow-card count was becoming a "matter of perception"; but then clarified that he felt the problem was becoming "self-perpetuating." No stranger to perpetrating fouls himself in his playing days, Johnson still regards such things as obstacles to be surmounted rather than readymade excuses for defeat.

"They put enough effort in to win that game, but they lacked for composure and execution," he continued phlegmatically, "It comes from self belief", he said, before adding, "this is a team that needs to understand that it is better than it thinks it is." He was, quite clearly, burying his anger and disappointment at the result behind carefully considered words. Defeat was an unfamiliar sensation to Johnson when he was a player, but he's soon getting used to it as a coach. His final words: "If we play like this at Croke Park, with two yellow cards, we'll lose."

Now that the game was won, Warren Gatland could afford to be altogether more gracious about the opposition than he had been before the match. "I'm more than happy with that result," he said. "It was a tough Test, a proper Test, and that's the way you want it to be. I thought England defended really well and they tried to play a bit of rugby too." His tongue wasn't even in his cheek as he spoke. "At half-time we said to each other, 'we're in a real battle here, and we've got to respond to it', and we did."

"I know a lot was written and said beforehand about it being a walkover, but having coached a lot of those individuals I always knew it was going to be tough," said Gatland. His assistant, Shaun Edwards, echoed that sentiment, "I thought [England] really fronted up. That said, for long periods of the game we were very comfortable. In the first 20 minutes we were very dynamic and in the final ten we kept control."

For Gatland the final moments were the most satisfying aspect of the Welsh performance. "I thought the way we looked so comfortable without the ball in the final six or seven minutes was great," he said.