Since then Martin Johnson’s men have played some scintillating rugby, notably in the back-to-back defeats of Australia, with Flood the architect in chief at fly-half.

But the Leicester stand-off says they cannot get too carried away with playing kamikaze style rugby.

He said: "“I feel more comfortable but that's also been facilitated by the change in tactics.

“We're in a position now where we want to challenge the opposition. We're not sitting there thinking: 'If we kick long we'll be all right because our defence will hold up.'

“We now feel we can have a massive crack at teams from the outset.

“It'll take a long time to change the stereotype of English rugby but it's nice to be able to go out and chuck it around a bit because we have the ball players who can do that.

“It's about making sure you wear the opposition down as much as possible and having the ability to spread it when they are tired.”

But while England got their 2011 Six Nations campaign off to the best possible start with a 26-19 defeat of Wales, Flood maintains Johnson’s men were far from their best.

“I don't think we played well against Wales,” he added. “We did some good things but it wasn't fantastically brilliant. There's still a huge amount to work on.

"Johnno [Martin Johnson] wanted to get across to us that we'd made a couple of errors in important parts of the pitch.

“Our communication let us down a little bit and we let them back into the game from 14 points up, which you can't do in international rugby.”