WHATEVER else happens as a result of the damning reports into England's desultory showing at the recent World Cup in New Zealand, one thing is surely true - the ethos at the heart of English rugby has changed forever.

No longer can the sport attempt to straddle the fault line between the professional and amateur eras, seemingly wanting to benefit from the best of both worlds but blindly ignoring the pitfalls that exist on either side of the divide.

Rugby has crossed the rubicon, and there is no turning back. There will inevitably be changes of personnel at the Rugby Football Union in the next few weeks - Rob Andrew's previously bullet-proof position as elite rugby director is surely untenable, along with that of the majority of the coaching staff - but more important is a shift in attitude and mindset among players, coaches and administrators alike.

This is not the 1980s, when players could blunder their way through overseas tours, drinking the bar dry and generally acting like a team of sixth formers let loose on an end-of-season binge, or when the RFU hierarchy could slip into their blazers, sip a glass of red wine in the boardroom and divvy up the complimentary tickets that were coming their way.

Yet read the explosive accounts of day-to-day life in New Zealand, and that is exactly the impression that forms.

Too many of the players, especially the senior ones, appeared to be treating the World Cup as one big holiday, with the added bonus of a money-making opportunity on the side.

"There was a culture where it was not cool to train hard," said one player. "The environment was a bit too jokey and disrespectful. It was an immature squad who took the p*ss out of some players for working hard."

Does that sound like a squad doing everything in their power to excel at a World Cup finals? Or a bunch of cosseted players desperately clinging on to the models of behaviour that were deemed acceptable, and even encouraged, in the past.

Ah, but rugby is different to football, some would say, and it would be wrong to break the links with the sport's Corinthian heritage.

Nonsense. In no professional sport would it be deemed acceptable for players to get roaring drunk, break all acceptable codes of conduct and simply not turn up to team meetings just because their seniority effectively made them immune from punishment.

And while the notion of professionalism was clearly anathema in terms of off-field conduct, it was certainly present when it came to remuneration.

"There's £35,000 just gone down the toilet," one player is supposed to have said after the quarter-final defeat to France. So the money from the professional era is acceptable, but the expectations that accompany it are not?

"It was the senior guys pushing the boundaries, treating it like an old-school tour," said a younger player. "If it's the senior players leading drinking games or drinking until they can't remember anything, what example are the younger players set?"

The whole thing sounds completely out of control, but while the senior members of the squad have to take responsibility for their actions, ultimately the culture of an England national side will always drip down from the top.

Martin Johnson and his coaching staff deserve considerable criticism for allowing such an undisciplined attitude to develop. Johnson was clearly too close to players he had once played with, some of whom were simply not picked on merit according to some squad members, while most of the coaches do not appear to have been fit for purpose.

Kicking coach Dave Alred is criticised for paying too much attention to organising his next round of golf. Defence coach Mike Ford is accused of using a string of buzz words that didn't really mean anything at all.

Most of the coaches were present at the previous World Cup in 2007, a tournament that witnessed the same amount of chaos, but that was saved by England's players effectively taking matters into their own hands and somehow reaching the final.

The coaches were criticised then, but were effectively retained en masse for the next four-year cycle. Why? Because the RFU is probably the most dysfunctional organisation in the whole of English sport (beating the FA hands down takes some doing), and structural paralysis has long been a barrier to progress in English rugby.

Will Carling famously railed at the "old farts" in the Twickenham boardroom, well the majority are still there stinking the place to high heaven.

At the moment, the RFU is devoid of both a chief executive and a national-team manager following the departure of Martyn Thomas and Johnson respectively, but the in-fighting continues and it is telling that most of the response to this week's revelations has focused on identifying the source of the leak rather than doing something about the chronic problems that have been exposed.

There are too many vested interests in the RFU, an organisation that is part of a dynamic, multi-million pound modern sports world, but which still operates like a parish council talking-shop.

There are too many layers of management, too many committees and too many ageing administrators who have their roots in an amateur era so radically different to the world in which the England rugby team now operates.

They too hark back to more innocent times, but as the events of the last couple of months have demonstrated, those innocent times have gone forever.

Major structural reform is necessary, starting with the dismissal of Andrew, but continuing with a complete overhaul of the make-up and workings of the RFU board.

England's next manager must have much more power in terms of the appointment of his staff, the code of conduct for the players at his disposal and the ability to shape the relationship between the RFU and the leading professional clubs.

Perhaps then he can start to create an environment where English rugby is truly professional, rather than a confused blend of the old and new.