Sat in the Bulls’ team hotel in north London, Jake White is recalling a rather busy night at The Stoop nine years ago when he wondered if he might become England’s next head coach.

A day after the Rugby Football Union and Stuart Lancaster had parted ways, White was surrounded by journalists following Montpellier’s game against Harlequins, with Twickenham in sight over the road, all asking him whether he wanted to take on the challenge of rebuilding England following their 2015 Rugby World Cup disaster.

“We played Harlequins and lost. I remember walking down the steps and a couple of supporters were going ‘you can’t coach England’. Then I had a couple of meetings with the RFU, didn’t get the gig, and it turned out Eddie [Jones] did. Eight months later we played Quins in the Challenge Cup final and beat them, and I thought ‘how bizarre is this’,” he tells Telegraph Sport.

After that initial defeat, White went into the Harlequins changing room and spoke with Chris Robshaw, still the England captain, and the Harlequins director of rugby Conor O’Shea, before staying behind in London to meet with Ian Ritchie, then the RFU’s chief executive.

“I must say, I was quite excited because I genuinely thought there might be a chance. Stuart had gone, I was coaching in Europe. You need to be in that European circle to get an opportunity. I’d had exposure into that market, knew the players a bit more, not just seeing them in England jerseys but at club level. Obviously it didn’t materialise and didn’t happen. It’s like sliding doors – what might have happened if we had drilled Quins that night?”

‘It was one of the jobs every coach wanted’

It is an interesting question. White had thrown his hat into the ring to become England head coach twice beforehand, in 2008 when England went for Martin Johnson and 2012 when they chose Lancaster.

“I will say it was one of the jobs that every rugby coach in the last 20 years has wanted, because there is so much to English rugby that is enviable for the other teams; the history, one stadium, the Premiership. It’s the sleeping giant of world rugby,” White continues. He is right. The amount of English success since 2003 compared to the resources on offer is entirely unacceptable.

One of the reasons for that, White believes, is that England have never been able to recreate that dominant pack of forwards who were the bedrock of their success in the early 2000s. White saw them up close during his spell as a technical advisor with South Africa under Nick Mallett between 1997 and 1999, then as Harry Viljoen’s assistant coach between 2000 and 2001.

“Still to this day I remember doing video sessions with the South Africa players. You had Grewcock, Johnson, Hill, Dallaglio, Back, Thompson, Vickery and two centres in Tindall and Greenwood who basically ran over you. When they couldn’t run over you they had two wingers who ran around you and a No 10 [Wilkinson] who, if they didn’t want to pass, could kick you to death,” White explains.

“I remember going through clips and saying ‘boys it’s very simple, Dallaglio comes round the corner, then Johnson comes short’. But the question the players were asking was ‘well, what do you want us to do?’ At that point in time England were so dominant that even if you showed the players what was coming, they still had to stop it.

“Somehow, from that time, England have not produced that kind of forward pack together as a collective, for a long time. That England side were like a South African team.”

So much so that when White was named South Africa head coach in 2004, he took England’s blueprint and applied it to the Springboks. Danie Rossouw was Dallaglio. Bakkies Botha brought the power England had from their locks. South Africa went on to win the next Rugby World Cup in 2007.

“Even if the [defence] knows what’s coming, if you do it well enough they can’t really stop it. And then England sort of went away from that over time. I don’t know why or what the thinking was.”

Almost a decade on from that meeting with the RFU, White is preparing to face his second English club opponent in the space of a week with Northampton Saints visiting Pretoria, a rematch of last year’s Champions Cup quarter-final defeat when the Bulls sent a weakened side to Franklin’s Gardens and paid the price.

Losing to Saracens in astonishing stormy conditions last week has left his side on the back foot but, speaking candidly, White does not believe that any of the South African franchises are ready to win the Champions Cup this season.

“Not yet,” he replies, before explaining that letting players remain eligible for the Springboks while playing overseas has been a flawed approach. “If I said to you we had RG [Snyman], [Handre] Pollard, Jesse [Kriel] playing for us next year – they’re all Bulls players who left the Bulls – and the other SA sides had their overseas players back, then you would have three, four teams that are really competitive.

‘There is a time when you need to earn your stripes’

“I’ve seen really good teams not win the Champions Cup [while at Montpellier]. The calibre of teams not even getting to the final. There is sort of a time where you need to earn your stripes in this competition. Anyone who thinks you just get on a plane to Northampton, roll them over and get into the semi-finals of Europe and march on is probably being naive in thinking that’s how easy it is to win this competition,” White explains.

Which is why the return of Wilco Louw, in White’s eyes, was such a positive step forward. The Springbok prop was outstanding for Harlequins during his time in the Premiership before returning to South Africa, and won his first Test cap for three years last month against England at Twickenham.

When White pitched a return to South Africa to Louw, he stressed that the prop was out of sight and out of mind while playing in London. “Now, the next time I have a meeting with another foreign-based player I can go ‘look at Wilco’. If you really want to have a crack, you might think you have no chance, the only way you can find out is come back and see whether you can go up a level.

“I’ve been pushing for a long time that we need players to come back and play in South Africa. We need the intellectual property to stay in South Africa and we need the provinces to be strong. We must not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

He may now be in his sixties but White continues to reassess and evolve, the defeat to Glasgow in last season’s United Rugby Championship final sparking a period of reflection. England’s first four years under Eddie Jones went pretty well. Who knows how they would have fared with White at the helm.