Both? No way, Jose.”I wouldn’t say I was tired, exactly,” he said late last week, a couple of days after formally announcing the end of a 73-cap run in the white shirt of the world champions. Why? Because the most celebrated British forward of his generation has reached the conclusion that whatever he might fancy doing at the fag-end of his career, he cannot do it all Wasps? Yes England? Yes. I’m so up for this, you wouldn’t believe it.”Yet England – Dallaglio’s England, a side infused with his inimitable spirit and cast, at least in part, in his swaggering image – will not have the benefit of this competitive surge. As Dallaglio himself admits: “I’ll be playing my rugby with a smile on my face this season, and if anything, I’ll train longer and harder than ever before.

He retired from the international game, to the surprise of the world and its wife, six days ago. Dallaglio always gave the England shirt an injection of raw energy, a transfusion of get-up-and-go. How, in the name of all that is holy, could he pack it in now, with the red-rose army in such a parlous state?Only a visually challenged imbecile would describe him as a spent force. When the November Tests come around, the Wasps No 8 will be mixing it with the hard-heads of Gloucester rather than the roughnecks of Canada, Leicester rather than the Springboks, Worcester as opposed to the Wallabies It takes some fathoming, even now.

The only people he will eyeball from now on are those clad in Premiership garb – Saracens and Newcastle and bloody Harlequins. If any senior England player was a stone-cold certainty to stand toe to boot with the South Africans and Australians at Twickenham this autumn, the captain was that man.Ten weeks down the road, Dallaglio is past tense as far as England are concerned. Dallaglio had suffered his share of thumpings down the years – most of them strictly physical, one or two of them deeply emotional – and had successfully absorbed them. He hit the waterfront bars with the young Bath outside-half Olly Barkley in tow, told a few ribald tales out of school – those featuring Jack Rowell, his first England coach, were as uproarious as they were unrepeatable – and then headed for the airport for the start of a long, three-cornered testimonial dinner stint, split between locations in the Far East and the Arabian Gulf It was exhausting, simply being in his company. Why should he not deal with this latest assault on his honour?
Sure enough, he was his button-bright self the following day.