Apparently we have been criticised for being too happy with our victory on Sunday. This is a strange one - we won, we had to dog it out, we had to show a bit of toughness when we weren't playing that well and when we were struggling for possession - and we came through it. We won, so of course we were happy.

Does that mean we think that England have suddenly found the form to scare the world? Of course not. We know there were errors and we were disappointed by them. We know too well that there are going to be harsh words from the coaches next week, we know what is coming and some of it is not going to be a whole lot of fun. Players are going to have to put their hands up and take ownership of their mistakes. There is going to be a lot of honesty and it's going to be hard.

From my personal point of view, maybe people aren't that used to seeing me happy. I guess this is part of the change in me because I used to be someone who could see only the negatives. The negatives were my driving force. I felt that my rugby was one long opportunity to fail and I seemed to dedicate my life to resisting it.

But just because I have a different frame of mind now does not mean that I am suddenly blinkered to the reality of the way my team and I have played. I am not suddenly wearing rose-tinted spectacles. If it is a crime to have enjoyed the win, then I am guilty. But I also know that I will not be looking at the tape of the game against Italy and considering it a great performance. It was not, we all know that.

Maybe I could rewind to a phrase that Sir Clive Woodward introduced to us: “energy-sappers”. You can't afford to have energy-sappers, people who dwell on the negatives in a way that takes energy away from the collective effort, people who bring the others around them down with them. Clive refused to allow energy-sappers in his squad and one of the greatest aspects of the current England squad is there are no energy-sappers now either.

That doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to address the negatives in your game - quite the opposite, you are encouraged to. But do it individually, don't bring the group down. We won on Sunday and the prime reason we were feeling positive is because we realised how much improvement there was to be done.

Or, in other words: how much better we could get. In the changing-room afterwards, that was the message from Brian Ashton and Steve Borthwick: we've won the game, brilliant, but let's concentrate on making everything so much better. Steve is a really good leader and, on Sunday, someone we all enjoyed playing for. He seems to have the balance right: happy to win but desperate to improve every time.

One area that we have to work on is our second-half performances and this is an issue that I cannot yet see as anything more than an unhappy coincidence. Yes, for two successive weeks, England did good work in the first half and undid much of it in the second. But that is not fitness, it is not as if we relaxed or thought the job was done and it was certainly nothing to do with the half-time team talks.

I would say that Brian's half-times are structured brilliantly. The energy is there, the messages have been right, there is certainly nothing more that needs to be done at half-time.

So what is it? Still, to me, it is just that possession and field position have deserted us at the same time two weeks in a row, our mistakes have all arrived simultaneously and so we have lost momentum.

And yes, there were quite a few of those mistakes, and yes we did struggle for possession and field position. And no, no matter how it may have seemed, we are not happy about that.