England must not be part-timers when they face up to Australians

Otley-born centre Mike Tindall, 32, and former Leeds lock Tom Palmer, 31, believe that but for a slow start and a few silly mistakes, England demonstrated in defeat to the No 1 ranked team last week that they are on the right track with the next World Cup 10 months away.

Another defeat to a southern hemisphere superpower, though, would only heighten the concern at England's worrying trait of gallant defeats, hence the need for a fast start against the Wallabies.

"What we're trying to prove is that we believe in ourselves and we believe we can take on any team," said Tindall, the former Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield, pupil who wins his 65th cap on Saturday.

"There were glimpses of that against the All Blacks but it's got to be there for the full 80 minutes against Australia and every team we play.

"You look at New Zealand and their scoring rate in the opposition's 22 and it's outstanding, up somewhere like 60 per cent. We need to be up there, that's what we're working on.

"We can take heart with the way we tried to approach the game against New Zealand. We weren't trying to be pragmatic, we tried to have a go at them and when we got it right we made the yards, but little errors let us down.

"We said straight after the game it's not good enough, we expect better of ourselves, especially in their 22. And that's the challenge for us this week."

Both Tindall and Palmer featured in the two-Test tour of Australia in the summer which began with an all-too familiar defeat and ended with a victory that will be seen as a turning point for the Johnson era should England continue the positive strides over the next three weeks.

Palmer, who won his first cap while playing for Leeds in the second tier, said: "We started slowly in the first Test against Australia in the summer and came back stronger in the second game – hopefully we can do that this week.

"Obviously we need to start better, and keep what we did in the second half going.

"We'll see where we went wrong in training, what we did right in the second half and make sure we keep that going in.

"It's going to be another really tough game but we've got to learn from last week, making sure we do the good things better and less of what we did wrong.

"We can take a lot of heart from the second half, we've shown we can play with the best teams in the world."

Someone who has proved that to devastating effect in the past is England front-row Andrew Sheridan.

The mere mention of his name would be enough to send shivers down the spine of some Wallaby props after he demolished Australia's scrum in the 2007 Rugby World Cup quarter-final.

England's loose-head was also responsible for splintering the Wallaby pack in 2005, prompting coach Eddie Jones to call for an Australian scrum school as a matter of urgency.

The Wallabies arrive at Twickenham with major question marks over their scrum once again after they struggled against Wales last weekend.

But Sheridan has learned from two very different, but equally painful, experiences never to under-estimate an opposing scrum.

Australia's much-maligned tight-head Al Baxter got his own back on him at Twickenham in 2008, producing one of his best scrummaging performances as the Wallabies clinched a 28-14 victory.

And last year, Sheridan let his concentration slip at a scrum in Sale's Heineken Cup match against Cardiff Blues and ended up with a dislocated shoulder that kept him sidelined for 10 months.

"We've had some good Test matches against them where the scrum has gone well but the last time I played them I didn't play particularly well, if I remember correctly," said Sheridan.

"With scrummaging it's always very important not to get carried away with how things have gone in the past or read too much into how Wales did against Australia last week.

"Because one thing you can guarantee with Australians is that they'll be coming at us with everything on Saturday.

"When you start believing that you're going to find it comfortable and march forward, that's when you can come unstuck. So it's important that we concentrate as hard as we did last week.