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Twickenham

After the flair, the fight.

If the thrashing of Italy a fortnight ago was a party full of Ash Splash and dash, was something very different - a brutal, relentless shift on the shop floor.

Hard graft replaced soft hands. Swallow dives were superseded by donkey-work. If anything, the effect was more impressive.

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When we analyse the improvement of rugby teams, there are plenty of incontrovertible statistics to explain and underline performances - basics, like tries scored and scrums won; percentages, of possession and tackles made and missed; tallies, of errors, offloads and line-breaks.

Most of the time they come together to form an equation that clearly explains victories and defeats. Most of the time, but not always.

Team sports can't always be reduced to mathematics or columns on a spreadsheet. Whilst (they have already scored almost as many points from their two games so far this year as they managed in all five Six Nations matches in 2010, and almost double the number of tries) there may be other, less easily quantified forces at work.

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Most of us will never experience the brutal, thrilling, terrifying feeling of playing in a crunch rugby international. The closest we will get to the thump and dash, to the adrenaline and fear, will be the television screen, or for the lucky few, a seat close to pitch-side.

Like many others I've often wondered what it's really like. So, with the assistance of England's key players in this Six Nations campaign, I attempted to find out. They didn't disappoint.

The countdown begins

Kick-off is only moments away. Deep in the bowels of the stadium, the players are making their final preparations for the fights ahead.

"We have a pretty intense meeting just before we leave the dressing room," reveals flanker Tom Wood. "Five minutes before you go out, there'll be a very aggressively delivered speech from the head coach or captain. They remind us that, at the end of the day, a rugby international is a battle.

"It's fierce, but it's controlled. Very rarely are you banging your head against the wall; you know there'll be enough of that going on out there. In the modern game you have to be very switched on to the technical elements. There's not a lot of room for just passion. Teams are too good - if all you do is go forward aggressively, they'll go through you."

Into the arena

Out of the tunnel, into a wall of noise. How do you cope with the immense pressure, with the sensory overload?

"If you're clever you can get rid of a lot of the adrenaline and stress hormone in the warm-up, hit some pads hard and then have your second wind ready for the game," says Wood. "Then you've burnt off the tension and you're ready to settle into the game.

"I've found the anthems the hardest part. That's when you start getting charged - you get the passion of your own anthem, you get all the noise of their anthem, and you're thinking, I just want that ball to go through the air, and not to me.

"In my England debut at the Millennium Stadium, I looked down and saw that my knuckles were white from clenching my fists. You're trying to stay calm and take deep breaths, but you're looking up at 80,000 people and thinking, 'Agh, I hope this goes well...'"

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We thought it would be tight. It was. We thought it would be deafening, and tense, and bone-shaking from first minute to last. We had that right too.

In a contest of relentless ebb and flow, England emerged from the rubble with a for two main reasons: they converted their chances into points when Wales did not, and in Toby Flood and Chris Ashton they had the two most influential players on the pitch.

One was the controller, the other the finisher. Between them they launched England's Six Nations campaign on the sort of trajectory that might just end somewhere rather unexpected.

This match was always bigger than just the opening salvo in what most reckon to be a very close championship. Any Wales-England fixture is soaked in centuries of cant and bile, but the way this one has fallen in the calendar gave it even greater significance.

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"A lot of labouring, a lot of hard work like chopping wood and fetching and carrying."
England's new cap Tom Wood was explaining how he earned a crust during his spell living in New Zealand, but he may as well have been predicting the job he'll have to do in Cardiff this Friday night.

With two days to go until the opening salvo in this season's Six Nations, . At the head of the charge will be new skipper Mike Tindall, on the flank the unheralded Wood.

The 24-year-old new boy might be advised not to dwell too much on the experience of the last England player to make his international debut in the fixture. At 6' 5" and over 16 stone he's unlikely to suffer the same physical fate as , but the atmosphere and intensity will provide a mental barrage all of their own.

Manager Martin Johnson is convinced he can come through unscathed. "Sometimes a young player comes in and they don't realise how good a player they are," he said at England's training headquarters in Bagshot on Wednesday. "He's one of those players who impresses you with everything he does. He has spoken well when he has had to, and his understanding and knowledge of the game is very good."

Perhaps Johnson sees something of himself in Wood. If he does, it's not entirely accidental. Wood decided to swap the Worcester academy for a less orthodox schooling in that rugby-obsessed corner of the world in part because a young Johnson had done exactly the same.

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