It was only after the game on Saturday that I was informed I had just passed 1,000 points in international rugby. That was something of which I was utterly unaware and when I was asked how I felt about it, my only answer was that I didn’t feel anything at all. It’s just not important.

I’ve always said that the points tally against your name fails to tell what is important: whether you worked hard, whether you were a good team man, whether you were fit, whether you were brave. What it does tell you is how good the rest of the team around you were and, as usual, I compliment the guys around me. They created the positions for me to deliver the points. And that is points for us, not points for me.

Certainly, one of the key guys in all this against Samoa was Andy Gomarsall. It seems amazing that Gomars actually started his international career two years before me, yet before Saturday we had only started three times together.

Back when Gomars was making his England debut, I was up at Newcastle learning from one of the best scrum halves I’ve ever seen. I’ve not known another scrum half as good at taking responsibility on himself as Gary Armstrong. He did it in a way that his job almost overlapped with mine. He took on so much himself and the opposition spent so much time worrying about him, he created more time for me.

With his experience, determination and indestructibility, he carried me through the start of my professional career. I cannot overestimate the extent to which his ability to take so much pressure off me allowed me to learn my job at No 10.

From Gary, I moved on to the England scene with the likes of Matt Dawson and Kyran Bracken, and because those two were always so established, Gomars was generally on the fringes, a guy looking for a way in. But all his experience and years in the game undoubtedly helped us on Saturday because we had to work things out together fast.

This is a little new to me. I’ve gone from a situation at Newcastle and with England up to 2003 where you always pretty much knew the teamsheet. That’s not the case with England now and there is a positive side to that – there’s no obvious pecking order, which means for the scrum halves there is genuine, relentless competition.

One of the highlights in this World Cup squad is seeing Gomars, Peter Richards and Shaun Perry pushing each other and winding up each other to the absolute limit. But when, last week, I found out I was being partnered by Gomars for the Samoa game, we hadn’t spent much playing time together and we had to make up for that by communicating as much as we possibly could.

During England weeks, I always take notes. I stick everything I feel is important down on paper. I feel there is so much to get my head around – the kicking game, defensive game, forward game, your own attacking game – that I need to have these notes to go over it all in my head. Gomars had plenty of thoughts of his own, but this week I handed my notes over to him: how I wanted the ball and when, when and where we were going to kick, the whole game as I saw it.

Everyone knows Gomars’s trademark strength: his pass. But, for me, this was where he was great this week – so quick to understand, so empathetic with my ideas. This not only fast-forwards your game planning, but we did it during the week, too. That way, he knew what I wanted to achieve in every training session and, again, that meant we trained better, we didn’t waste time, we fast-forwarded the whole process.

Please do not interpret this as me saying I’d have Gomars ahead of Perry or Richards. That’s not what I’m saying at all. My point is that we showed how quickly a new partnership can work if approached intelligently. And yes, I do think we did OK.