Like his game, straight up straight down, there is a brutal and endearing honesty about Kevin Maggs. Maggs on the pitch is as Maggs off the pitch. No frills.

"The end of the match, the last five minutes? We were just saying blow the f**king whistle," he says. "We threw everything at them. We wanted it more." A day of simplicities. A day of committment, of one common voice.

David Humphreys, hopping down the corridor of the changing rooms at Lansdowne Road on a pair of crutches, saw that suffocating England was the best way. His touch-kicking winded them continually.

"We knew that if we were going to compete with them we were going to have to be dogged and stop them playing," he says. "We thought they'd attack us and we worked it out. We talked about it during the week. We talked of how we were going to combat them. It had to be clinical. You can be pretty and fancy after being clinical but we stopped them playing and kept them in their own half and it's hard to play rugby in your own half.

"Our defence was outstanding, certainly with ours first up with their danger men running through. We knew they'd be a threat out wide but Shane (Horgan) and Denis (Hickie) did well in closing them down." Hickie who only ever saw the ball when he got it himself bore Humphreys' team view that it wasn't all that unexpected.

"It was no surprise after the way we played," he says. "We knew if we played in a certain way we'd have a good chance and that's exactly what happened. We wanted to put pressure on them, get the ball behind them a fair number of times.

"As a result I didn't get as much ball as I would have liked but that's how it goes. I'd a lot of defensive stuff, a lot of kicking, a lot of chasing, tackling and a lot of phases. We'll look at Samoa now, not New Zealand. Maybe against Scotland people were looking at the England match." Trevor Brennan, unleashed in the second half and hulking down the corridor, disgards his granite image to pat kids on the head. A man for a hard skirmish. Brennan is it.

"We knew it was going to be hard. We knew it was going to be a dog fight right to the end. England are up there with Australia, New Zealand and South Africa . . . the character the team showed, especially after Scotland, was special," he says.

"It was a pressure game and there was always going to be just a score in it. When I came on there was just one score in it but we got another penalty and it was eight points. You felt that bit more comfortable but there was no relaxing."

Malcom O'Kelly, the lineout security man and tallest in the team targeted the smallest, Peter Stringer, for his kindest words. "His tackle was probably the best tap tackle I've ever seen. Those are the kind of things that win matches," he says.

"The way to beat them was to stop them winning any good ball. So we put pressure on them in the lineout, the scrum, the first phase. We knew it was going to be hard but we believed we could win. If we didn't think like that there was no chance. We just knocked them back whenever we had the chance and that's how we played it. It was absolutely brilliant." On the bench anxiety levels were a little higher at the fag end of the game.

"I got a tap on the shoulder and they said 'okay Daws, you're on'," says Kieron Dawson. "I said to myself 'Oh Jesus I'm going to come on here when we're winning and we're going to lose it', you know one of those days where we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Every time we turned to the ref, he just turned his back to us. At the end though, even though they were attacking, I thought they looked like a beaten team."