11 February 2008 - No Roman holiday

FIRSTLY, let me explain the dive.  

I honestly thought Masi was much closer than he was. 

He's a No 10 for Italy but he plays centre for Biarritz and I'm not exactly the quickest. But when I looked at the video of the match he was miles away from me so it was a bit of an inappropriate moment.

It's very rare that I cross the whitewash and though I've scored a few for the Newcastle Falcons the last time I got two in two games must have been for Morpeth Under-11s. 

Yesterday I was just happy to be in the right place at the right time.

The most important thing is that we won the match. You only have to look at Noony's forehead with 10 stitches in two gashes to realise how tough it was.

Rome is a tough place to come and win. After every game we'll look at the tape and see what went well and what we need to work on. 

It was fantastic to be in front at halftime but we have been there before so we knew what to expect. 

We knew the Italians would never die and they came back fighting hard. All credit to them, they made it very difficult for us.

That said, we felt strong and comfortable at halftime.  We seem to have a problem putting teams to the sword and really punishing them. Maybe it's just a mental thing - we think the job's finished and it's not. Perhaps it's more technical than that, perhaps not getting get into our patterns and our shapes but we'll definitely be looking closely at the video to try and resolve the problem.

We have some tough games coming up and the next one is France in Paris which is a daunting prospect but also an exciting one. The Stade de France is a tough place to go but we have been victorious there in the past and that has to be a positive. 

We have the potential to win every game, we have a great squad but we are going to have to play massively better than that in Paris. It's a whole team responsibility.

Jonny copped a lot of flak ahead of the match but I thought he had a good game overall . It's difficult to control a game like that at fly-half but he had a hand in both tries.

It was a shame Vicks was ill. To lose anyone from the starting XV is difficult but to be without your captain is tough. 

But I thought Steve Borthwick led the team well. He gave two great speeches before the game - one in the changing room and one in a huddle before kick-off. That really got us in the right frame of mind.

Overall it was a good weekend for England with the Saxons, Under-20s and the Womens teams all winning. It shows the strength of depth in English rugby especially considering the Saxons won in Sicily without the guys who were playing Guinness Premiership rugby at the weekend.

We're flying back today and then straight back into a 10.45 gym session tomorrow morning. That'll get us back into the club environment very quickly and although you sometimes wouldn't mind a couple of few days off, that's the reality of professional rugby and we get on with it.