Chris Robshaw will send England into battle against New Zealand with the warning there is "no hiding place" if they are to overcome the world champions.
England are hoping to end a sequence of four successive defeats to the All Blacks at Twickenham on Saturday, in the process serving notice they are credible challengers for the Webb Ellis Cup next year.
Crushed
Robshaw was captain in 2012 when Richie McCaw’s New Zealand were crushed 38-21 and outlined what it would take to repeat one of the finest victories in England’s history.
“There’s no hiding place. We’re not going into this game to come out second best,” Robshaw said. “You can’t stand off these guys for a second. It’s about us putting our game out there.
“You have to defend extremely well and take your chances – there is no magic formula to beating them.
“In the pressure of the situation it’s about who is able to do that and keep their composure. It’s about being clinical.
“In international rugby you know you’re going to get a couple of chances, but in international rugby, when everything is flying around, are we good enough to take our chances?
“As an England squad that’s the next step we need to take if we really want to push ourselves up there.
“We need to be as clinical as these guys coming to town this weekend. They are the benchmark of world rugby. Playing them is a great way to kick-start the autumn.”
New Zealand will be followed into Twickenham by South Africa, Samoa and Australia in a full-on autumn schedule that will gauge the strength of English rugby.
Each Southern Hemisphere superpower will be looking to complete a morale-boosting victory, knowing all knockout games of next year's World Cup will be staged at the same venue.
“With the World Cup at Twickenham, they all want to come here and play well. We want the opposite – we want it to be a fortress,” Robshaw said. “We want the atmosphere to be similar to the last two games here, against Wales and Ireland, and the performance to be similar to them also.
“There’s a lot of talk about next year and of course this is the last time we will play each other prior to that.
“We’re at home and we want to show the crowd we’ve come a long way in the last year.
“We felt we were unlucky on tour in New Zealand in the summer. We didn’t get what we wanted (England lost the series 3-0), but there were a huge amount of positives we’ve brought back here.
“We felt we got quite close in some ways in the summer and we think we excelled in certain areas so can see that our side can hurt them.”
Meanwhile, France manager Philippe Saint-Andre is continuing his experiments with yet another halfback pairing as France take on Fiji in the first of three November Tests on Saturday.
Starting combination
Less than a year before the World Cup, Saint-Andre named his 13th starting combination when he chose to pair outhalf Camille Lopez and Sebastien Tillous-Borde in a team featuring South-African-born fullback
Scott Spedding
.
It is the first time that Tillous-Borde will play for France since he won the last of his eight caps in a Six Nations game in 2009.
