Rarely has the blundering of schedulers taken a heavier toll than it did as the absence of a fixture on what we might think of as World Cup 2015’s ‘Blue Monday’ left a vacuum to be filled by disappointment verging on despair and recrimination whipped up by those with agendas.

With rumours circulating and gaining credibility at the now standard rate in this social media dominated world, so the absence of any match action meant there was not the slightest distraction from what was, admittedly, always going to be a huge sports story.

The intensity of the focus on the hosts' exit consequently brings me back to a theme raised early in the tournament and the fact that we should have matches every day of the pool stages.

The 20-team format and the need to factor in rest days is perhaps as much to blame for that not being the case as any insecurity that left organisers worried that they would not get people to attend matches in the early part of weeks.

However until rugby is sufficiently global that it can find 32 competitive teams for a World Cup it will be much better to get down to 16 participating teams and four team pools that make it easier to even out fair schedules which prevent the overall tournament from becoming too protracted, an ever more serious issue now the hosts are out and, after Sunday, we are down to weekend action only with an awful lot of talking time in between.

My recommendation continues to be to offer automatic qualification for the next tournament only to the eight quarter-finalists, with a qualifying finals tournament two years ahead of that tournament into which the teams finishing third in pools would qualify automatically and those finishing lower would then go through a phased pre-qualifying competition of the sort that is currently in place, along with all other countries in their regions.

As well as providing an extra major competition that would allow emerging nations to have a taste of the benefits that come from being hosts, reducing the main finals to 16 teams would mean that playing one or two matches every day we would have a shorter sharper burst of pool matches, one per day on weekdays and two on weekends, completed in little more than a fortnight.

Instead we have lots of time to examine whether Stuart Lancaster should have spent more time on scrummaging than culture-building, should have forced his employers to change the criteria that, in a bid to protect English domestic competition, prevents players based outside the country from being selected and, of course, the popularity of the management among the workforce that is the players.

Returning to that is it not inevitable when there is a group of sixty plus people they will not all get along famously? Listening to Michael Lynagh’s coded messages about the great ‘Campo’ (David Campese, his Wallaby World Cup winning team-mate) last week when, during a Q&A session at the end of an appearance at the Henley Literary Festival, he was asked by an audience member about how they might have managed him in the professional era, was a reminder of that. Any friction within the ranks did not stop their team from winning matches.

As to whether some of the squad did not like every aspect of how the management did things and had doubts about the reasons behind some decisions, notably in selection, welcome to the real world folks.

Admittedly there was a complication in terms of having Andy Farrell on selection when his son Owen was involved in one of the more competitive positions, but it spoke well of all concerned that he was the member of the coaching team who chose and was allowed to face the media yesterday and some of his detractors could learn a great deal from the way he carried himself.

Beyond that, the big mistake by any management is not to accept that some in the camp will let them down under pressure and to understand that there are all sorts of benefits to be had from those in question exposing themselves. Breaching what were thought to be confidences does not mean they need to be discarded, it merely offers insight into how they should be treated in future.