Record books mean nothing to Robshaw

England’s new boys have nothing to fear from Ireland or their country’s poor home record against today’s visitors to Twickenham, captain Chris Robshaw and coach Andy Farrell insisted yesterday.

Ireland have won at Twickenham on three of their last four visits and overall have only been beaten once by England in the previous eight Six Nations encounters, a 33-10 away defeat in 2008 that marked the end of the Eddie O’Sullivan era.

None of that matters a jot to a freshly assembled England squad intent on consigning the awful memories of the previous regime’s World Cup campaign to the dustbin under caretaker head coach Stuart Lancaster.

Skipper Robshaw will win just his sixth England cap when he leads the new-look side out at home at 5pm, with only five survivors from the team that faced Ireland in Dublin last year, which Ireland won 24-6.

He will be playing Ireland for the first time having only made his Six Nations debut in February against Scotland but has led his country to three away wins, including last Sunday’s victory over France in Paris. The Harlequins flanker is keen to live in the present rather than dwell on previous pitfalls.

“I can’t speak about past experiences because I wasn’t there and a lot of this squad haven’t actually played against this Irish side,” Robshaw said.

“Of course we know the challenge, that Ireland come here and they have a very good record against us here at Twickenham. They’ve done well in the Heineken Cup and other competitions against English sides so, we’ll take the positives of what we have achieved in this Six Nations and it’s about backing that up again. But we know we’ll have to raise our game another two gears or so to compete with this Irish side.”

Assistant coach Farrell was also keen to discount history and instead look at the current players’ performances.

“These boys are not frightened of anyone. We’re up for any type of challenge and the way they’ve trained this week, after what could have been hard experiences in international football, the intensity has gone up. They [Ireland] have been saying they’ve got a good record here and are playing well but that means nothing to this group, they weren’t involved in those games, bar a handful of players.”