Two weeks ago the story line for next month’s internationals concerned an ageing 29-year-old fly-half and his chance to show England’s new coach he could still be his country’s playmaker.

It was an opportunity Jonny Wilkinson deserved, one Martin Johnson wanted him to seize. With the young and gifted Danny Cipriani recovering from a bad ankle injury, autumn promised to be Wilkinson’s season.

How quickly things change. Twelve days ago Wilkinson suffered a terrible knee injury playing for his club Newcastle Falcons against Gloucester and then, the very next day it seemed, there was news that Cipriani’s recovery was miraculously ahead of schedule – he would take Wilkinson’s place in England’s elite squad. “The younger rises when the old doth fall,” Edmund said in Shakespeare’s King Lear, and never had it seemed more true.

Even if injury comes with rugby’s territory and even if you accept Cipriani is now the better player anyway, it is still hard not to feel for Wilkinson.

From the World Cup final in 2003 until the Six Nations match against Scotland in 2007, he was not once fit enough to be selected for England.

The dislocated left kneecap suffered at Gloucester is the latest in a long line of injury setbacks in his career and you understood why a reader of Wilkinson’s column in The Times on Friday advised him to retire. “The time really has come Jonny. The way you play, it will just keep happening.” It was easier still, however, to understand the wish, expressed by every other respondent, that he returns to the game as soon as he can.

It is hard to imagine anyone who has been more admired in the game, but not at all difficult to understand the reasons for the admiration. For here he is, sitting in a hotel room on Thursday afternoon, not long after hearing that he will be out of the game for at least five months, and he is being asked how he feels about a situation that has seen him limp out of the squad and allow Cipriani to stride back in.

He laughs, self-deprecatingly, as if he only now realises he could have timed this better. But when you suggest the loss of another opportunity must hurt because he’s human, he gets serious. “Incredibly human,” he says, “but at the same time, things can be hugely frustrating and quite problematic if it’s all about you.

“If I had looked towards next month’s internationals and thought, ‘This autumn is going to be my time, it’s going to be great for me’, my natural reaction to the injury would have been, ‘What about me? Danny has come in, what about me?’ You take the ‘me’ out and you can say what is actually happening. I was loving my rugby, I got an injury and I need to recover to get back to play more rugby. That’s a situation I’m happy to put myself in.”

He recalls a moment from Newcastle’s game at Saracens last month, standing behind the posts as their rivals’ conversion stretched the scoreline to 44-0. “I’m stood there thinking about my next involvement in the game, and how I wanted it to be good. Sure enough, things opened up and I’m in under the posts scoring a try and even if it wasn’t going to change the result, it was like, ‘Yes, I’m absolutely adoring this’. I know if I continue to do what I’m doing, another chance will come for me.”

He will envy Cipriani and the other England players as they set off with Johnson on what could be an extraordinary journey. “The set-up, with what Jonno is bringing and Brian Smith in there as well, is as positive, as ambitious and as fearless as you could possibly want, which makes it a huge springboard for all the guys involved. Over the last few years I have had quite a few conversations with Brian Smith and I sense he is detailed and enormously empathetic. I imagine he would probably have the ability to play the game well right now, and that is always a bonus when you are being coached.”

The ironies in his life were always there and they now come with sadness, however well he tries to disguise it. He was once a self-absorbed perfectionist whose obsessive commitment to preparation and vulnerability to prematch anxieties drained much of the fun from his life. He recognised his failings and sought to correct them. The changes have been significant and Wilkinson is now a very different man to the Jonny-we-hardly-knew.

The irony is that the reformation of his character came during long periods of injury, but further injury now prevents him from enjoying the full benefits of the change. He has always sought a better balance and when at last he achieves it, he is denied the chance to play the game that remains integral to a more balanced life. He has been blessed with an admirably strong character – but he has needed it.

The original irony was that a consummate team player should have been built up as an individual star. He hasn’t forgotten the anguish. “I was enormously dogmatic in those days, the way I fought against it. I smile now when I think back. It was like, ‘I must not accept praise above anyone else in the team’. There were times when the Sky News camera would search me out when we were walking from the team coach to the hotel and as the camera-man backpedalled in front of me and the rest of the team walked past, he would still keep his camera trained on me.

“I would be thinking, ‘Whatever you do, don’t look at the camera, don’t smile because people might think you are enjoying this, try to look moody, as if you’ re annoyed, as if you resent it’. All the energy that went into that kind of stuff, as if there wasn’t enough stress playing the games. I used to believe the camera guys were deliberately trying to separate me from the team, to get at me that way, but that wasn’t the case.

“They were just doing what they were told to do and I just had to tell myself, ‘It’s just a guy with a camera in my face, it doesn’t bother me, I don’t have to give off any impression, what I have to do is walk from the coach to the hotel, end of story’. Life is a lot more simple when you see things that way.”

Cipriani gives the impression of being comfortable with the attention, of being able to see it for what it is. “It took me a long, long time. If it’s something that Danny has found already, then that’s great, that’s going to be real handy for him. Especially in the early days, it drove me inwards; the more people wanted to put me up on the big screen, the more I wanted to hide in the corner.

“It would have been easier had I been more like Lawrence [Dallaglio]. At the 2003 World Cup, he was more than happy to take little strolls from the team hotel and the openness that he showed to English fans meant there was respect both ways. Because he was relaxed, the fans would see him and say, ‘Oh, there’s Lawrence, he’s having a relaxing walk with his wife, leave him alone’. He had a great way of doing it. I hid away and people came searching for me. Danny maybe has a bit of what Lawrence has and maybe he’s learnt from being with Lawrence at Wasps. I am pleased to have gone through it, and come through it. I have got a very good understanding of the whole process.”

During last season’s Six Nations he was in the same England squad as Cipriani and was, for the final game, displaced by his rival for the No 10 jersey.

What did he expect of Cipriani and what did he find? “I didn’t really expect anything. Because I don’t watch much rugby, I didn’t know what Danny was going to be like and wasn’t even sure what he looked like. When it comes to rugby players, I steer away from any kind of judgments and allow my natural instinct to decide on what a guy does on the field. That’s always a good enough marker for me.”

In the development of his relationship with Cipriani, he applied a principle learned from his fitness trainer and confidant, Steve Black. “Blackie was once asked to help a football team, quite a big football team in fact,” he explains. “He went in and said, ‘Do you know what guys? We haven’t got long to work together and we’ve got loads of stuff to get through and what I reckon you guys should do is just like me, just like me anyway. That way, you’ll save a lot of time’. I thought it was brilliant, a great way to work, because they were going to find out soon enough that Blackie is a good guy.”

So, he decided Cipriani was a good guy and that he liked him? “Yeah, I did. And he is; he’s a good guy who wants to play at his best. If you put people on trial and weigh up their actions, you start wondering, ‘What did he mean by that?’ That stuff isn’t helpful. When you decide to like people straightaway, you realise most people are damn good.”

He and Black have co-authored a new book, Tackling Life, and it illuminates the player’s journey to maturity, helped and guided by his mentor. It also offers us an insight into Wilkinson’s rugby philosophy and his absolute belief in the primacy of the team. His all-time favourite player is, of course, his former England teammate Richard Hill. “Richard didn’t know what the easy option was, he couldn’t hide even if he wanted to. He would do the extra work so that others wouldn’t have to and he would never join a ruck that had already finished.”

There’s a wonderful story Wilkinson tells that reminds us again of who he has become. It was an old Heineken Cup game for Newcastle at Perpignan during which he suffered what seemed a bad knee injury. In the changing room afterwards his tears of frustration were mistaken by Newcastle’s medical team for tears of pain and another Newcastle player with a knee injury, Andy Buist, was asked to vacate the physio’s bed to allow Wilkinson to be more comfortable.

Buist was helped off the bed, Wilkinson hobbled onto it. Buist had a ruptured cruciate ligament that put him out of the game for 12 months, Wilkinson had a medial tear that cost him two months. “Boy, did I feel bad about that one.” True to form, he had the decency to recall it.

The five-year itch: Jonny’s never-ending tale of woe

Dec 2003 A month after the World Cup win, he damages his shoulder and is ruled out of the 2004 Six Nations

Oct 2004 Misses the autumn Tests with a haematoma after being named England captain

Jan 2005 Knee ligament damage costs him another Six Nations campaign

July 2005 After returning in May to make the Lions tour to New Zealand, he injures his shoulder in the second Test

Sept 2005 An appendix operation, followed by groin problems and a torn muscle, prevent him from returning to action until late in the 2005-06 season

Sept 2006 Misses autumn internationals with a knee injury

March 2007 After returning to England duty in the Six Nations he misses the last two games of the tournament with cramp

Sept 2007 Misses the first two games of the World Cup in France after a training injury

May 2008 More shoulder surgery; misses England’s two-Test tour to New Zealand

Sept 2008 Dislocates knee and is almost certain to miss the 2009 Six Nations