James Haskell only concerned with performance as England close in history

“Ireland have had a great competition so far, showing vast resilience to win four tough games”, said England coach Simon Middleton.

Stating that Ireland were favourites for the title coming in, which was certainly not the opinion of the bookmakers, Jones said Joe Schmidt’s men must be “grossly disappointed” with their Championship.

A huge try-saving tackle by Emily Scarrett on her opposite number Jenny Murphy typified that champion spirit and having repelled Ireland’s best efforts, England were able to find another gear to ease clear, with further tries by Laura Keates and Amy Cokayne, Scarrett and Lydia Thompson.

“I haven’t really seen it”, he said of Jones’ comments that Ireland’s game plan would be “kick and clap”.

“We’re very fortunate to sit behind a juggernaut pack”, says Youngs, about to represent his country for the 70th time. I think that is a bonus with the two toughest fixtures still to play.

Should they do so, Ireland will also halt a world record winning run for the second time in five months.

” You don’t win 18 tests in a row by being anything other than quite exceptional”. We need to produce that.

Jones, benefitting from England’s large playing base and years of good youth development, has created a bench of replacements or “finishers” as he calls them who would start in many another side.

It’s the kind of transformation that is more associated with the make-believe world of Hollywood than real life, but England’s revival from World Cup flops to being on the brink of back-to-back Grand Slams and on the cusp of breaking a tier one world record for consecutive wins is truly exceptional an achievement.

‘This is about the challenge we face Saturday and wanting to perform and wanting to show what we are worth. “Obviously it was a great thing to get the performance against Scotland but there’s no point in celebrating when you’ve got more to come”. “It’s about being in the moment for 80 minutes, and if you look after that moment for 80 minutes things will take care of themselves”.

Sam Aspland-Robinson, Tom Curry and Nick Isiekwe return to the side after missing the 33-5 victory over Scotland last week while Gloucester hooker Henry Walker earns his first start. “When we get the opportunity to play them, we’ll play them”, the former Australia and Japan coach added. It was North’s best game for his country in a long time.

Jones’ winning mentality has meant England are never satisfied – they performed brilliantly in the dead-rubber against Australia last summer, and they seem so intent on making history tomorrow that I can’t see them failing.

“I think previous year he might have said that we kicked 60 percent of the ball that we had”, the New Zealander said. “A lot of the groundwork has been done and we have a fantastic group of players”.