England have started well in the Six Nations but still need to improve, says Will Greenwood

England have made a winning start to the Six Nations but there is the potential to improve - and that should be the focus ahead of the Ireland game, says Sky Sports pundit Will Greenwood.

The theme that came out from last weekend is that the fans weren’t entirely convinced by the win over Italy; they were expecting more. That is the sort of expectation that’s shifted onto a team after a definitive win in Cardiff. In the opening weekend England played with intensity, precision and a forward-step defence that could have stopped a herd of stampeding buffalo.

Against bigger teams you may have a good performance without getting a result, but you won’t get a result without a good performance.

So why then, just one week later, were there eight or nine line breaks from an Italy team that last year lost to Japan and only managed one win all year? And that against an understrength Samoa.

England will be aware of the fact that just like in Cardiff they started the game badly, and they can’t keep doing that. As the old cliché states, better teams will punish them for it, and those teams will be stepping off the tarmac at Heathrow Airport in September.

After a poor start, England then won the middle period of the Twickenham Test match by outscoring their opponents 47-5. However with 12 minutes remaining, rather than standing on the throat to complete the job, they went on to concede a try in that final period and failed to score any points of their own. That was the disappointing part of the game from an English perspective. There were plenty of great individual performances on the day, but the team’s missing intensity and inability to finish Italy off with the same brutal craft of Cardiff is something that Lancaster will address this week.

Scrutiny

There will be those who say that I’m being greedy in expecting England to beat Italy by more than 30 points, but my focus is on the performance rather than the result. Against bigger teams you may have a good performance without getting a result, but you won’t get a result without a good performance.

Scrutiny is important in a World Cup year. At no point can you accept any mediocrity or afford to sweep any poor aspects – however minor - of a performance under the carpet. England can play better, and they should aim to do so.

They were aggressive in attack against Wales and against Italy they subliminally dropped a fraction deeper. Lancaster and his coaching staff will be well aware of those infamously small margins that can win or lose a Test, and will move quickly to smother the sort of issues that could cost them dearly in Dublin.

Because in the Irish capital awaits a far more accomplished project. Joe Schmidt is the king of the minutiae, and Lancaster and his team will be focused on those little game-changers in order to outwit a very clever opponent.

One thing Ireland do incredibly well is dominate the restarts. There are as many restarts these days as there are scrums so it’s an incredibly important facet of any team’s play, and Ireland have made it a focus of theirs. The next two weeks for England will be about doing the little things right all the time, in every department, in preparation for Dublin.

Nervous

Both sides have developed gradually over the last 12 months and neither wants to be pigeon-holed as a two-dimensional team. It’s a credit to Ireland that they find themselves on a nine-game winning streak, but the last team to beat them were the self-same England side that arrive at the Aviva - albeit without the 82,000-strong choir they had at Twickenham last year.

The Irish fans should be excited by the position of their team but they’re also a tad nervous and that’s down to history. The most startling World Cup stat around is the fact that, despite the talent they’ve had at their disposal over the years, Ireland have never made it past the quarter-finals. The players will need no reminding of that.

If you look at the two sets of coaching teams, Schmidt and his team were able to dismantle two of the big three teams from the southern hemisphere, but looking purely at the Six Nations - and particularly the way England have performed in the second half of both games - you can see the value and tactical nous of Lancaster and his men.

Having spoken to both sets of coaches it’s clear that they respect each other immensely, but there will be plenty of work being done behind the scenes trying to find any minuscule edge to win what will be a very close encounter between two World Cup hopefuls.