In his Six Nations column, the Betway ambassador and Grand Slam winner says skipper Dylan Hartley will relish his added responsibility
When you consider the talk from Eddie Jones in the week leading up to the game about the importance of both the pack and set-piece, I don’t think the style of England’s win in their Six Nations opener came as too much of a surprise.
It wasn’t high in subtlety but it was a controlled, solid performance.
Scotland seemed to suffer with the added expectation following their impressive World Cup which seemed to affect their mindset compared to the carefree attitude they were playing with in the autumn.
They played off too much slow ball and made too many handling errors to get anything going, although a lot of the credit for that must go to the England defence which got on top of Scotland and stifled them until they ran out of ideas.
Hartley leading by example
Dylan Hartley was central to everything that was impressive about England’s performance in his first game as captain.
He ran the line-out exceptionally well in only losing one of his 15 throws, while the scrum appeared a lot more dominant with him in it.
You need guys like him who will stand toe-to-toe with anyone and it showed that the Scotland pack was probably missing someone like that in a Jim Hamilton or a Scott Murray who would never take a backwards step.
A lot has been made of Dylan’s disciplinary issues but captaincy is not new to him having done it for so long at Northampton – he is a natural leader in terms of his enthusiasm for the game and his desire to put in the hard yards.
You either have that in you or you don’t, and even during my spell as England captain he was a very vocal member of the group.
Good captaincy is all about understanding the squad you have and how to best manipulate it in order to get the best out of the players.
I was not a big talker unless things needed to be said, and focused more on the tactics of what we had worked on all week rather than the emotional side of things.
It all depends on the players around you, and I never had to fill that void.
Chris Robshaw probably had a lot more weight on his shoulders in that respect as he inherited a very young team without too many talkers, but a lot of those players now have a lot more experience which takes some of the pressure off. 
Opening up
England were actually very clinical in attack – they only really had two clear-cut chances and converted both of them into tries.
The combination between both backs and forwards to set up Jack Nowell’s score was brilliant and hopefully we’ll see plenty more of that.
Eddie Jones is doing things methodically and will change his style in order to get results.
It’s all a building process and it will be interesting to see how he approaches the Italy game on Sunday.
I believe that we will see better rugby from England when the opposition play better rugby against them, and judging by the France game it looks as though Jacques Brunel has given them more license to go out and play in his last tournament as coach.
Hopefully we see the likes of Mike Brown and Anthony Watson being able to play with a bit more width and freedom since the majority of ball that they saw against Scotland was in kick returns.
The best of the rest?
It is difficult to know what either Wales or Ireland can take out of their draw on Sunday.
Ireland never normally throw away 13-point leads so Wales can take heart from their comeback but they will be kicking themselves that they were unable to close the game out having edged ahead late on.
Lloyd Williams should have sent his box kick long to put Ireland on the back foot, although I still think that the referee might have made a poor call in penalising Tomas Francis for the penalty.
Some of the rugby from France, meanwhile, was outstanding.
All of their tries were very well taken, particularly in keeping the ball alive for Virimi Vakatawa and having the confidence to take a quick tap from a penalty to score in the corner.
You can already see the effect of some of Guy Noves’ work in terms of constantly shifting the point of attack which could well mean that Ireland struggle to go to Paris this weekend and get a result.
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